Month: February 2018

Digests 3.2.6 (not RC13 this time) released

On: By: Mark

Please see this post for details. You can download the latest version from my digests page or get it here in GitHub.

There’s really no new functionality but it does clean up a few bugs, changes in minor ways the look of some ACP pages (Edit subscribers mostly) and addresses the issues by the last review by the phpBB extensions team. It’s been submitted for review by the extensions team and most likely will get approved.

It took about 6 weeks to get a review last time, so I expect it will take about that long this time too. But maybe since it is reaching a release stage they will expedite the process.

Some pricing changes

On: By: Mark

I’ve upped some of my prices. You can see a list of all my prices on my services page.

I’m trying to recapture the labor involved in answering your questions prior to you hiring me. Not everyone who inquires of my services hires me of course. Typically there is at least an hour of time involved in back and forth emails with clients. This time was not built into my pricing structure, meaning I am effectively discounting my own labor rates by giving away this time for free.

So mostly this amounts to $10 or $20 increases for services I do most of the time, such as updates, upgrades, conversions and extension installations. My basic labor rate is unchanged. Obviously if you choose not to hire me you don’t have to pay anything. But if you do I want the work I do for you to reflect the full amount of my effort. And that typically involves at least an hour of back and forth communications over email, often more, usually over many days, as details about the work are refined.

My prices remain very competitive. If you can find a better deal out there, please go for it.

I also updated the page to discuss developing extensions for clients. In general I don’t do it, but I will refer you to other extension authors I trust. Mostly it’s due to a lack of time as developing extensions takes considerable time. Extension development is quite costly and most clients usually decide they cannot afford to have custom extensions developed anyhow.

January 2018 work summary

On: By: Mark

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.