Don't you agree?

It depends on your point of view.

On the one hand it gives you tremendous flexibiltity in site building.

On the other it gives you a complete nightmare in administration.

A day in the life of a joomla webmaster...

In one of my last posts I was talking about the benefits of niche marketing and discussing how the poker site wasn't working.

So today I started on rectifying it.

What a disaster day! If you are going to start upgrading old versions of joomla then be prepared for a long stint!

It started out with me trying to figure out why I keep getting personal messages on the forums but no one actually posts on the forum. It's a bit puzzling. So I created a pseudo user to find out what was wrong.

Turns out that the bridge between joomla and phpbb was broken!

Now, this could happen for a number of reasons and not just because I'm a slacker, because new patches for joomla are released on a regular basis. So at any point over the last 12 months or so the registration process could have been broken because of a new joomla patch.

So the first thing to do is to make sure the site is running the very latest version of joomla. This is something that I keep on top of but as the number of sites you run increases so does the time you have available to maintain each one decrease.

More staff please!

It's so important to keep up with the patches, there is no excuse for not doing it. A hacked site is a sorry sight first thing in the morning I can tell you. I've seen many over the years.

Once it's updated the forum problem still exists so it's time to update the PHPBB version. This is a fairly straightforward process but still has it's intricacies.

Now I'm upgraded I find that the rokbridge is outdated and so the forum and joomla users are no longer "syncing".

I go to get an upgraded version of rokbridge only to find that my rockettheme subscription for PHPBB themes expired two days ago. AARRGGHH!

Another $60 later and I've got access to get the latest theme update and all the add on's.

The total process takes about six hours, that's including time spent with phpmyadmin, taking the site out of "legacy mode" (compatible with joomla 1.0, where older components like the link exchange component) so that the new items will work properly, installing, uninstalling (the rokbridge installation instructions are not the clearest in fact they are shite, let's be out with it!). Using ftp to remove unwanted modules, it's just not an easy job.

It's more or less a whole days work to get this site fixed because as fast as you diagnose and rectify one problem you create another issue.

Here's some advice from an old timer. OMG I'm an old timer!

Do everything on a development server.

Don't have one? I set up a LAMP thing on my PC once but really I don't think it's worth it. Once you get to 10 employees and all those overheads you can afford an IT guy/girl to do all that stuff for you.

Always, always backup your files before you start playing about.

Always, Always, Always rename your target file before overwriting it and checking it works. Just rename the file to .old or something to be safe. And be safe, this is not like screwing around, this is screwing with a difference.

Always make sure you have a full system backup and verify that your hosting provider can provide it. Invent a crisis and make out you've deleted your site or fucked up badly. Ask them to do a full restore.

No matter how badly you screw up you can always return to sender. No matter how good you are it's always cool to have a fallback option.

You can't back up enough stuff. What do you think they have those massive hard drives for? Your porn videos? Nope. It's to protect your business asset.

Even though the site isn't making any revenue I've done some posts and I'll make a renewed effort to get the forum kicked off.

Other stuff

I've moved the bingo site to a new server that supports PHP5 and installed the calendar app which i think is going to be so cool. I'm just waiting for this weeks affiliate update to populate the events and have it looking really cool. Having a site that details all of the upcoming promotions without having to hop from site to site should be good.

What a pain in the arse that move was! I was going to use joomlapack but it turns out that it only runs on PHP5 so for my sites on PHP4 it's no good. Luckily I had shell access so I could zip up the /home folder, move it to a folder within a site that I hadn't changed the nameservers for and download it, unzip and upload to it's new location.

One of the moreniche product affiliate managers found my male enhancement site in Yahoo and wanted to know if I wanted a unique review. Of course I do! If you act on stuff they will give you more stuff more quickly because most affiliates are lazy.

Got asked if one of my scratch card sites was for sale. No thanks, what do you think I do this stuff for! Sites get better with age. Like wines.

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