This was a slow month for my business. It wasn’t a problem. I made my goal for the year at the end of October and was also teaching a class. Good to have some downtime. It allowed me to get out a new version of my digests extension.
But I did do some scattershot work here and there in November, updates mostly, including this work:
- Upgraded a forum from phpBB 3.2.1 to 3.2.3. Initially I could not login to the Administration Control Panel. Changed cache folder permissions to make everything writeable and eventually was successful. I had to copy all the files from a version 3.2.3 reference to get the updater to work due to TWIG library errors that occurred when I tried to update the database. I reapplied the forum’s style changes for the logo and a PayPal button. I updated the Advanced BBCode extension from version 3.1.3. to 3.2.1. Changed all tables to use the InnoDB storage engine instead of the old MyISAM storage engine. There was an issue with the topics table. I had to remove a MyISAM full index before I could change its storage engine.
- Additional work for a client I mentioned last month. Last month I completed a long upgrade of their forum from phpBB 3.0 with many modifications. In this latest work I changed the mailing list extension to use a new “Subscribers” group I created instead of Registered Users for sending topic and post notifications. This made it easier to opt out people who did not want these emails by simply removing them from the group. I created the new group then populated it with a SQL query by adding everyone in the Registers Users group to it. I provided instructions on how to remove people from this group. I noticed an inconsistency in phpbb_user_group table, removed lots of bogus rows where the user_id in the table did not exist in the phpbb_users table. I manually removed a bunch of people who did not want these notifications from the new group. A few days later, I refined the query to also filter out those where a column I created called user_email_all_posts was set to 0. I used this approach when a similar functionality was done on phpBB 3.0. All the notification issues seem to be fixed now and no latency has been reported due to emailing when creating new posts. Phew!
- Troubleshooting. A catchable fatal error occurred on a client’s forum. It took a while to get access to the web host control panel due to the client’s illness. Once I had it, I manually purged the cache. This generated a different error. I changed PHP from 5.6 to 7.0 though made it go away. I changed permissions on the cache folder too. Later I updated the forum from phpBB 3.2.1 to 3.2.4. When I tried to run the update it said phpBB was not yet installed! I searched through the phpBB source code to see what triggered the error, eventually discovering it was because a .lock file was present in the cache folder. I removed it and the update was successful.
- Updated forum from phpBB 3.2.3 to 3.2.4. No issues. Later, I installed the mChat extension on the forum.
- Updated forum from phpBB 3.2.1 to 3.2.4. Updated the AllanStyle-SUBSILVER style that was the primary style, putting back the old logo. I removed the old security certificate, and installed a free Let’s Encrypt certificate. I changed the forum’s .htaccess file to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS. I discovered one issue on the index: insecure content was being served. This was due to http:// being in the user_avatar column of the phpbb_users table to serve avatar images. Used MySQL REPLACE to make these avatars to be served securely. In some cases there may be a blank space now because the server did not support HTTPS. I changed PHP from 5.6 to 7.2. This work inspired this blog post.
- Updated a forum from phpBB 3.2.2 to 3.2.4. Upgraded the Cleantalk extension to the latest version. I changed config.php to use mysqli. This allowed the forum to work with PHP 7.1 (it was on PHP 5.5).
