Profiles

animals, ancient Egypt, writing dark fantasy, learning RWD (responsive web design), learning JavaScript, learning WordPress, my personal web projects, taking photos, drawing, finding knowledge, philosophise, learning to take care of house plants, wood sculpting (after I get a garden)

I offered to help a Danish publisher of fantasy books written for adults (UlvenOgUglen.dk). Their admin had left them somewhere between 2013 and 2014, leaving them stuck on WordPress 3.9. That was the year 2021. It took me three years to learn what WordPress really was, document all my work and find a path to upgrade not only WordPress, but also plugins. I had to do this very slowly and with zero data loss. These last two criteria were by far the hardest. I could not simply upgrade WordPress to the newest, because that would break their custom theme design’s menu (not a child theme!) plus, they ran on PHP 5.3, so compatibility was completely bonkers. Any attempt that seemed remotely easy resulted in a fatal PHP error!

I quickly realised all this had to be done very carefully; and I had no idea how *anything* WordPress related worked. I first tried a migration guide from a 3rd party, but that did not get me all the way. After realising what a challenge I had accepted, I began to test. A lot. I made a lot of backups, and I even developed a new backup structure and learned about local, staging and production testing environments because of the official WordPress documentation. Nice job, people! Now the real work would begin.

Fast-forward from 2023 and into 2024 and I had finally developed all the know-how, techniques and written my own step by step guide on how to properly migrate everting. These learnings are absolutely required to establish different PHP local testing environments through XAMPP, and they allowed me to migrate the WordPress installation between PHP versions, so that I could quickly iterate on WordPress, plugins and PHP versions, until I found a combination that was stable on all sides. Or at least stable enough to run this ancient beast together with ancient plugin versions and themes. I was easily able to find old branches and their patches for WordPress, but the plugins were only offered in their newest version.

As I write this (the 9th of August 2024) it is 6 days since I finally managed to lift their live version of WordPress from a branch first published the 16th of April 2014 (5.3.x) to WordPress-version 4.4.32, a branch which was first published the 8th of December 2015. This in turn allowed me to upgrade PHP to a much more recent 7.0, which then opened up for updating a few plugins fully. (Those that do not use any WordPress functions from after that branch).

So that was first phase one. Now, hopefully I can upgrade WordPress fully before the end of the year, if no more extreme difficult scenarios pop up!

Next phase on my journey is to find a great combination of WooCommerce and WordPress, so that the shop can become more recent, but still not break the theme, which is based off of the deprecated Wootique theme.

WooCommerce is by far the most important plugin, and only recently did I stumble upon their GitHub-repository. Which actually opened up an upgrade path. Originally, I had feared I would have to wait until I had upgraded to PHP 7.4 and WordPress to the most recent version, so having access to their repository is a big help!

The phase after that is to upgrade the Mailchimp plugin, hopefully to a version that will support their 3rd API revision, so that the gears of that website can finally start turning again, allowing people to subscribe to the newsletter *and* have a much more pleasant user experience journey; From first visit to hopefully leaving a wonderful review on a great book their found on the publisher’s website. One can only hope!
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Meanwhile I did all this I moved my sister from a FrontPage website to a fully upgraded version of WordPress. Luckily, this was a much simpler task!

I have yet to fully grasp the workings of the block editor and the block themes. There are so many things that changed since 3.9, and I never used or knew WordPress before this and I am learning it all from the perspective of an admin and not actually creating any content myself, which makes it much harder to grasp! But I am determined to learn enough to safely guide friends and family in their WordPress journey.
Now, if I could just find more spare time, things would be much easier!