I kept plenty busy in August, but not in the way I expected. First, with my major commercial client having deployed our project we’d been working on for 2.5 years, I figured that work had dried up. That was wrong. Second, without the client’s work the other work I figured wouldn’t amount to much so I’d have significant downtime. It didn’t work out that way because there was a ton of work for my major client that now seems to be wrapping up, things not noticed in testing and likely wouldn’t have been in until lots of people were using it.
The good news is that my client did a great job of deployment and there were no critical issues whatsoever after deployment. The testing was good and he went through a number of test deployments and automated everything he could with an Ansible script. It turned out that I was out of town at a funeral during the deployment, but he was able to handle it without my help.
So the post deployment work was generally a lot of analysis and retrofitting customizations via the extensions I wrote for him. There’s a close coupling between phpBB and the rest of the web site with a tight eCommerce integration. It turned out to be 45.5 hours of work, most of it after August 14, all of it at my commercial rate, which amounted to a heap of unexpected money.
Work for other clients was relatively minor:
- Rehosting from Network Solutions to A2 Hosting and a major upgrade of their phpBB board from version 3.0.11 to 3.3.8. The only way I found to backup the database was inside of phpBB. I tried to run the Support Toolkit but it failed. It turned out that it didn’t matter. It took me a while to figure out where the files were supposed to go on A2’s hosting, but eventually put files in the right place and the upgrade ran without errors. I noted a missing avatar. I also disabled the contact form.and removed some modules for dead modifications from phpBB 3.0.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.3.6 to 3.3.8, and the Advanced BBCode Box extension to version 3.3.4 and sitelogo responsive extension to version 0.6.3. Also updated German language pack to 3.3.8. Initially I could not login to board. Looking at PHP error log it was due to three notification types being enabled for the PayPal donation extension which was disabled. I fixed it in the database and I was able to login. I reapplied stylesheet.css changes to the show the custom logo.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.3.7 to 3.3.8. Client was still concerned about missing emails. I saw no issues of emails not going out in cPanel’s Email Deliverability area. It may be that users aren’t subscribing to forums? http links in emails should redirect to https based on a redirection rule I set up some days earlier. It turned out redirection needed to be configured to use a wildcard. I provided more guidance on emailing issues and using cPanel. The next day I did more fine tuning: I added the missing favicon.ico and made some edits to a new style he installed to show a custom logo. I somehow missed adding the American English language pack.
- Client got a HTTP 500 error. After investigation, I determined that files were missing in the /phpbb/cache folder. Once I got Dreamhost access, I determined the board’s version of phpBB was 3.3.4. So I uploaded the few missing files and that solved the problem.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.3.0 to 3.3.8. I also updated the Google Analytics extension to version 1.0.6 and reapplied the logo. There was an issue with multiview not working in the .htaccess file. I removed that code and that HTTP 500 error went away. I think the hosting is configured strangely and that was the cause of that problem.
