Site Maintenance...

So... there's some site maintenance coming up. Fortunately, it seems like I've fretted way more about how difficult that might be than it was worth. Fingers crossed it will run smoothly, when I run it one of the next few days. Just in case this interests you, here's the background:

This website runs on Joomla!, which is a free and open-source CMS (or content management system). Basically, this means something you install to give you a basic structure, and a lot of templates that you can use to get a certain look. It's a good bit easier and quicker to handle than writing html from scratch, and uses the new-fangled things like css and javascript and shenanigans like that. It also keeps you updated on any new developments coming in, as there's a bunch of people working on the system, keeping it up-to-date regarding security, database versions, and whatnot.

There's several CMS to choose from, if you are setting out. I decided to go for Joomla! (yes, with an exclamation mark, even though that makes for awkward typing) because when I was first looking into making an online shop, I found a shop software that looked sensible and useful to me, and that was based on Joomla!. So when I set up the current site, pulling everything together into the same base made sense.

The blog, however, was running on blogspot back then. I wanted to migrate the whole thing, and found that J! doesn't have a good blog setup suitable to get the thing over. That may have changed by now, but back then I found there was a plugin that could be bought, integrating  Wordpress (which is primarily a blogging system, unlike J!, which is more a general-content-in-articles system) for blogging into a J! site. Ah, the things that are possible these days.

That's why my blog is running on Wordpress inside a J! installation.  From time to time, there's updates for some extra functions coming in, such as the spam protection used in this blog. The most recent one then made said anti-spam break because it doesn't support the current WP version that I have... since the special circumstances mean I don't get the regular updates for Wordpress, and those for the inside-J!-version usually came quite a bit after the regular ones. (If you caught a glimpse of spammy comments, these happened during the c 24 hours that I needed to find a replacement for the plugin.)

So... I went to check for an update for the plugin I have, and found out that there is sort of one. The company who made Wordpress4Joomla is not offering it anymore as a subscription service - the files are now available on GitHub, for free. Even better, and slightly unexpected: an update was included in this list just 2 months ago, to the almost-newest version of Wordpress, 5.6. Which is very, very nice, basically - but since there's just the files in the repository, and no support or explanation, it means some figuring out had to be done on what to do. Hence the fretting. Accompanied by some looking into options in case I don't manage to update the thing, and/or updates stop completely and I need to change to some other blog plugin.

In the end, after looking at previous installation packages and the files in there, I started up the (already rather old) copy of my site running locally on my computer, and tried to just copy the new files with changes in them over the old ones, bringing my WP first from 5.1 to 5.2, and then from 5.2 to 5.6. And lo and behold! it did work, as far as I can tell from this test.

Which means that I can go and try to do it on the actual live and running thing, here. As soon as I have a bit of time and the necessary inner calm to do so, because it's always a little nerve-wracking to do things like that... even if there's backups to roll back to the previous version in case things go pear-shaped.

I'm really happy, though, that I was an adventurous student with enough free time on my hands back when the Internet started to become what it is. My first site, done just for fun, was written by hand in html in a plain text editor. That gave me a good, solid basic understanding of things internetty - and over the years, by having to keep at least partly up to date with how things developed, I gained enough understanding of the scripts and things that came into being to not be completely daunted. I can more or less understand some things happening when I read scripts - not well enough to do my own programming, but it suffices for a lot of small tweaks that are necessary in some cases. And that, when it works, is also deeply satisfying!