So I hadn’t been active on my blog for a while as I deep dived into the abyss of learning Javascript and frantically thrashed to keep up with the Northcoders bootcamp.
I got the automated emails about maintenance and plugin updates, but like the other 50 odd emails that hit my numerous accounts, they were all scanned briefly, mentally archived, then pushed to the ‘look at later’ queue.
Finally the time came and I tentatively returned to the blog dashboard.
There was the initial fumbling around the interface, reminiscent of a holiday car upgrade, the puzzling landscape of a buttonless interface and the confusion of a key used to neither unlock the door nor start the ignition?
I began to refamiliarise myself and begin the step by step process of updating the inner foundations of the website. First updating WordPress itself, then the theme, then the list of plugins.
Then…….
Hmmmm, that’s not good.
I had covered PHP and WordPress on a previous course the year before, but it felt like a distant memory after my saturation in Javascript and I was hardly competent back then. The whole experience had felt heavy going for a tech newbie, not only due to my first exposure to PHP but also accessing the back end for the first time via my hosting package. I can remember my initial horror the first time I opened Filezilla, learning about SFTP and saw the reality of an SQL table. Just exploring the control panel from my hosting service was cryptic and intimidating.
I was like the guy who buys a second hand car, pops the bonnet and looks inside as though they have a clue what they are looking for.
“Ah yes, the engine….. I thought that would be there……. yep …….. looks good……. I see……..hmmmm, windscreen wash…… yes. I believe this is for the…….. oil…? ……….. yes, brake fluid, yes that’s what I said…….. and this is the…….. t…tu..turb….turbbbb……air filter, yes right? Well it all looks good to me.”
I can remember being told of the white screen of death when dealing with WordPress.
This wasn’t quite a white screen but it certainly felt like I was in that ball park.
After becoming familiar with Javascript error messages I felt like the error message being presented to me was a bit of a chocolate teapot.
So there was an unexpected ‘)’ somewhere……
Great.
I turned to the Google haystack and started looking for answers.
After many articles I managed to get into wp-config.php and set up WordPress error logs by simply switching the condition of the debug code to true. Easy when you know how.
define('WP_DEBUG', true);This was progress but it wasn’t time to crack open the Champagne just yet.
I wasn’t quite sure where to look at this stage and continued down the rabbit hole of articles about issues with updates within the WordPress ecosystem. I found myself in the SQL database manually disabling each plugin. I downloaded a new version of WordPress and updated that. I updated themes, removed themes and still I didn’t seem to make any progress.
The phrase of throwing mud at a wall seemed to be appropriate.
What began with sitting at my desk to ponder a blogpost, had become a number of days blindly rampaging around the blog’s backend with all the precision of a brick. I was beginning to resign myself to the possibility of losing my blog and all of the work within it.
At least a new found familiarity with the blog’s SQL tables and a bit of navigation around them (some more googling and articles), allowed me to discover that all of my content remained intact.
From the gloom and frustration this felt like a bit of a breakthrough. If everything was still there, surely it wasn’t such a leap to access it again.
I presumed that to someone familiar with WordPress this was an easy disaster to rectify and not really a disaster at all.
I thought of my early cooking days trying to make mayonnaise, the emulsion splitting and then being left with some weird oily mixture with some kind of curdled element. The resolution of this early culinary disaster was frustration, confusion and maybe a smidge of anger, followed by a furious dump into the bin, the whole exercise a waste of time.
If that happened to me now, it would be a case of “Whoops, that was a bit clumsy of me.” grab another egg yolk, re-emulsify and finish the mayonnaise. Crisis averted (if ever there was one…).
Those days as a developer felt a long way away.
Some more googling and the culprit seemed to point to the Yoast plugin not playing nice with the current version of WordPress. I was close but unfortunately I didn’t know what to do next.
I felt like I had followed the trail to a brick wall.
I had discovered how to get more information on the error, how to upload a new version of WordPress using SFTP, how to access the database for my blog and navigate around it, how to disable or remove plugins, manually remove or update themes and identify plugins that were causing an issue. I had identified the problem, I just didn’t know the solution.
I finally cracked and got in touch with the help desk of my hosting platform.
Within 10 minutes my blog was back online.
It seems I can’t call myself a developer just yet.
