I’ve completed a nearly two-week vacation, so this report of my work in November is a bit late. I did a fair amount of work in November, mostly miscellaneous stuff. One big event was finally quashing my digests extension bug that reported bogus container issues, which was in the place I least expected: an event handler designed to intelligently shut things down if a lack of resources occurred. In addition, I wrote a draft of a SCSS compiler extension.
For my large commercial client, work is definitely ebbing as development is complete and we are moving into a testing phase. We went through a trial upgrade using a copy of their production board running phpBB 3.0.11, which was designed to be a smoke test. The copious notes I took when I did it last year when I did it helped a lot. There were a few bugs in our custom extensions that needed to be fixed. But overall the smoke test went pretty well. While I was on vacation, the client hoped to do a second smoke test using Ansible.
Other work done in November:
- My client did most of the moving of files and database for his board for this rehosting to Siteground. I changed the domain and I placed the board into a subdomain. The client provided a refreshed database that I reloaded somewhat tediously. It took four attempts with timeouts to import it all. The site used a Sitesplat style and a ton of Sitesplat extension, neither were really needed as the site was purchased, the extensions weren’t actually used and the style was proprietary. After moving database and putting it in a subdomain, I upgraded board from phpBB 3.2.8 to 3.3.5. I removed most of the Sitesplat stuff and the unused Sitesplat extensions. I kept the Share On extension (no upgrade available) and updated the phpBB Media Embed extension. I installed and tweaked proflat style to match colors on main site. Later, I moved board from the subdomain into a folder to address client’s SEO concerns.
- I upgraded phpBB from version 3.2.7 to 3.3.5 and PHP from 7.2 to 7.4. I updated the Metrolike style and reapplied template and theme changes. I upgraded nine extensions too.
- Client’s board reported PHP version could not be used. It was configured to use PHP 7.0 due to some sort of incorrect GoDaddy change that was applied in mass to lots of its servers. I waited more than an hour on the phone to talk to GoDaddy to eventually learn that this was an enterprise problem. It was subsequently fixed by GoDaddy.
- I updated phpBB from 3.3.4 to 3.3.5. I updated the board’s Italian language pack to a phpBB 3.3.5 version. There is an upgrade to the advertisement management extension I did not do.
- Solved the long issue with digests not running correctly that I mentioned above and applied it to a suffering client who had been dealing with it for a while. I installed version 3.3.11 of digests with an unsubscribe link patch, set up a new system cron and tested it and it appears to be working okay. Charged for two hours of my time to address numerous questions on web hosting that they asked.
- I updated a board from phpBB 3.3.1 to 3.3.5. I also updated my digests extension from 3.3.2 to 3.3.11 and the stop forum spam extension from 1.3.10 to 1.4.0.
- Made modifications to david63’s user details extension (which david63 is apparently not supporting) to make it work as a cron. It had already been modified by the client to change CSV to tab-delimited output. Getting it to work as a cron required a lot of tedious debugging and testing as crons are hard to test, and the code was a bit hard to read.
