I didn’t do much work in January, mainly because I spent most of it on vacation: 19 days in total! It was a great vacation: a 16 day circuit of the Panama Canal on Holland America, from Fort Lauderdale to San Diego with lots of ports of call. In addition we stayed an extra day in San Diego to see its infamous zoo! I do have a few buns in the oven at the moment including a large project for a large client that I am starting work on that may take a month or two.
During my vacation my site’s certificate expired. I tried to fix the issue remotely when I had Internet, but just couldn’t do it with my Windows laptop. That may have cost me some business. It’s all fixed now.
On the infrastructure side, I upgraded my iMac to use a solid state drive. Things are so much spiffier now!
Before and after my vacation though I did squeeze in some jobs:
- A client got rid of his forum due to low traffic but wanted me to do some WordPress work for him. He was been having WordPress security issues. I examined his WordPress .htaccess file. I found no issues there but redundant duplicate code was removed. I explained how the .htaccess file works and provided advice on updating, finding, fixing and proactively handling security for WordPress including Wordfence and UpdraftPlug plugins.
- Two forums were upgraded for the same client, both from phpBB 3.0.12 to 3.2.1. Since the forums caters to German speakers, with the upgrade I installed two German language packs (casual and formal honorifics). On the first forum, I installed the prosilver_se style. I installed the Navbar search extension thinking it would help with styling but eventually disabled it as it was not needed. I changed style a bit to somewhat match old logo and background, experimenting with CSS until I found something that fit. Since the user could not login, I created a new account (after enabling registration) and gave myself founder privileges in the database. The next day I upgraded the second forum. I integrating the old logo but it did not look right with the new style. I tried changing the background color for the style but it still looked off. However, it was acceptable to the client. I then installed version 3.2.6 of my digest extension, and set up and tested the system cron job to ensure digests went out in the hour requested. I used curl and set the cron to run at top of the hour. I resolved a permissions issue that allowed any registered user to be a global moderator. There were some hosting issues: I could not find a link to cron in the web host control panel until the customer added it to my account. The next day I fixed a database issue: changed default for user_topic_sortby_type from m to t. This was apparently changed by some phpBB 3.0 mod. I updated the database to change this value to t for all users.
- Troubleshooting. A forum gave a “is_dynamic missing” error message, which was actually a row in the phpbb config table. It took a bit of puzzling but it turned out that the forum’s config.php file was pointing to a phpBB2 database! No wonder the row was missing! I searched and found another database that looked like it had the tables for phpBB 3. But it was missing the last 5 tables. I found a copy of the database in the store folder dated 12-18-17. With customer’s permission, I reloaded that database. Bringing up board, the phpbb_login_attempts table was missing so I created it manually. I could not login with customer’s credentials so I created an account for myself and gave myself founder privileges via the database. The subsilver2 style was misidentified as Red Silver. I renamed it to subsilver2 in the database and enabled the Red Silver style. This fixed the styling issue and the site’s logo appeared in the header like before.
- I upgraded a forum from phpBB 3.2.1 to 3.2.2. An issue with quoted characters repeating themselves horizontally and vertically, overwriting the quote, was solved with upgrade. Replicated logo in header and changes to footer. This was my first attempt to update to phpBB 3.2.2. I quickly learned that (a) the incremental update still does not work reliably and (b) you need to apply some patches. Other than that (to quote Monty Python), phpBB was perfectly fine!
- I upgraded another forum from phpBB 3.2.1 to 3.2.2. Database updater failed due to timeout. The real issue were some bugs in 3.2.2 and had to apply some patches to complete the upgrade. I reapplied the logo. The search index erroneously pointed to nonexistent MySQL index. Pointed it to phpBB native and message went away.
