Business here at phpBB Services was a bit slow in November but it picked up toward the end of the month. It worked out to a nicely profitable month in the end. Here is a summary of the work done this month. All identifying client information has been withheld, of course:
- Tried to fix more malware issues for a client who uses WordPress for a site to advertise his business. Because of the malware, his web host would not allow me access to the site to fix it, but they did provide a Dropbox with the files and identified the known files with vulnerabilities. Setting it up on my machine was complicated but I finally got it to work. I corrected the known problems and compared WordPress and all plugins with referenced files. I checked the database too for malware. I removed all unused themes, including one with a known vulnerability. I updated a few plugins and WordPress itself. I zipped everything up and sent it to the web host, who installed it and found no errors. But later on despite my best efforts and scanning all the files by the web host, the malware returned. The malware looked like it has been injected into a business theme. The frustrated client ditched WordPress. Not sure what he is using now but I think he moved to weebly.com. I can’t say I blame him. I tried to fix this for him as a favor. While I dabble in WordPress but don’t consider it an area where I have any particular expertise.
- I installed the Advertising Management Extension on a forum running phpBB 3.2.1. I spent extra time troubleshooting and analyzing his ad placement questions … apparently there was an ad missing in the footer. I found one missing on the portal page and suggested checking his Adsense code to see if it is still correct, as it left a blank area on the page.
- I upgraded a forum from phpBB 3.1.9 to 3.2.1. Since the client has a SCCS-based style, I reinstalled the Artodia SCCS compiler extension after the upgrade so I could give it the desired look. The colorizeit.com site unfortunately doesn’t work on phpBB 3.2 styles, so I looked at changes made originally using colorizeit.com to his Elegance style for 3.1 and replicated them for his Elegance style for phpBB 3.2, creating new custom style I called Elegance Orange. There were some issues with drop down controls and the style that the client noticed. Fortunately, I found a newer version maintained by another style artist that fixed these bugs. I installed that version of Elegance, made a new Elegance Orange style again and reapplied the code changes to the theme and templates. Customer satisfied!
- Client had issues accessing tabs in the Administration Control Panel. I tried to look in the database using phpMyAdmin but got a token error trying to run phpMyAdmin. I figured the issue was with the database itself, so I repaired it outside of phpMyAdmin. There were still issues so I deleted the cache manually and the errors stopped. The client approved converting tables to InnoDB to reduce likelihood of further issues. I had to put Unix 777 permissions on the cache/production folder. For some reason they did not inherit. I recommended that the client complain to web host and ask to be moved to newer hardware and software as he was constantly running out of quota and they were using old Windows hosting.
- I updated the Tapatalk extension from version 2.0.3 to 2.0.5 based on email client received from Tapatalk.
- I moved a forum from FastComet hosting to TMD hosting, both the database and files including files for the website, not just for the forum. I changed the DNS in GoDaddy to point to the new hosting.
- I updated the Tapatalk extension from version 2.0.3 to 2.0.5 for another client.
- I installed the Advertisement Management Extension on a phpBB 3.2.1 forum using the standard prosilver style.
- I installed my digests extension (version 3.2.4) on a new phpBB forum. There were some issues getting the cron to work right. It required a support ticket to the web host to get path to curl.
- I updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.0 to 3.2.1. I had to upload all the files rather than the changed files because the upgrade would not work otherwise.
- I upgraded forum from phpBB 3.0.10 to 3.2.1. Due to the high availability requirement of the forum, it was a two step process, first to verify it could be done at all. In the first step, I created a test database and copied the production database into it. This exposed MySQL shared hosting quota issues, so it took a while to copy all the tables correctly. Trying to recreate the search index on the test forum also caused MySQL quota issues. I installed the Flat style and integrated the old logo, changing some CSS to place the transparent logo image on a black background like before. Converting the production forum was straightforward. I placed a copy of files and database into a backup folder first. I copied theme as I configured it from test forum to save time. It all looked good so I deleted old database, the test forum folder and subdomain too.
- Client worked with his web host to move his WordPress site and phpBB forum to a new server. The forum did not come up. Upon investigation, I determined that the forum’s files were moved but database hadn’t been moved. I exported the database from the old hosting and imported it into a new database on the new hosting. I edited the config.php file so it correctly connected with the new database. I purged cache manually otherwise the cached file would still try to connect to the old database. I set folder permissions correctly. I then upgraded the forum from phpBB 3.1.9 to 3.2.1. There were no complications, just one image to replace. Later the user discovered that post images weren’t showing. When I tried to bring up the forum but the phpBB3 folder was gone! I recovered it using File Manager. The post images still didn’t show. It turned out that the path to Imagemagick had changed from the old machine. Once the path to it was fixed the images showed. I also changed some settings to use the new security certificate installed.
- I fixed a weird issue that developed with Forumrunner modification installed on a forum running phpBB 3.0.10. Forumrunner is similar to Tapatalk in that it allows a forum’s posts to be seen inside of a smartphone app. In the forum’s error log, I discovered an error that said the Forumrunner program expected to write to a missing fr_token column in a table. I scoured the web for a reference and found its datatype (tinyint), then added the column to the table with phpMyAdmin. It should make this issue go away. I also provided an estimate for upgrading to phpBB 3.2.1 but the client is not interested at this time. Hopefully there are no more Forumrunner issues like this!