February felt a bit less busy than January, but busy enough. Here’s a summary of my work for clients last month:
- Tutoring. With a client’s passing away, I did some analysis and answered questions for the woman who had to take over site and board responsibility, regarding the current hosting on BlueHost and potentially rehosting elsewhere.
- Updated a board from phpBB 3.3.9 to 3.3.10. I also reapplied a tweak to .htaccess file to load portal page by default.
- Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.0.13-PL1 to 3.3.10. I installed the default style with no extensions on Hostgator hosting. No real issues but to keep WordPress working I changed PHP from 8.0 to 7.4. I disabled contact page, set up the reCaptcha V3 spambot countermeasure and the site home link.
- Billed a commercial client for some sporadic advice I provided since May 2022.
- Accomplished a sort of rehosting and conversion from phpBB 2.0.22 to 3.3.10. The board and software was so old, it was running MySQL 4 and PHP 5. There was other content on the board from mods that were not carried over. There were some annoying issues. Export on MySQL 4 was not compatible with and import into MariaDB. I had to change CREATE TABLE statements to use ENGINE rather than TYPE. Also, loading the database for conversion, it was editing the extract so as to not populate the search tables. There were some mysterious problems during the conversion too that seemed to be mostly due to inconsistent data in the phpBB 2 database. Ran across an odd ACP access issue that was due to modSecurity being enabled. Set up MySQL fulltext index and home page link.
- Updated to board from phpBB from version 3.3.3 to 3.3.10. With no web hosting control panel access, the client will need to change PHP to version 8.
- For my major commercial client, more odds and ends.
- Implemented a new feature to show a learning page for certain users in their profile area on the view topic page, and created a user control panel interface allowing users to toggle this feature on and off
- Updated the board software from phpBB 3.3.9 to 3.3.10
- Fixed an issue with a special site cookie’s expiration time not being extended by phpBB when certain actions occurred on the board
- Fixed an issue with the footer where the social media links did not have their background colors changed when they had focus
- Worked with client on a strange issue when authentication was changed between database (db) and OAuth. It made it impossible to get into the ACP if a user had the permissions.
