Honey, I blew up the website.

Well, for those of you following the trials and travails of the website overall, you will be relieved to know that it is finally back online.  I don’t know quite what I did to it (well, actually, I know roughly what I did but no one seems to know why it broke) but I’ll tell you this: backup, backup, backup. 

I foolishly installed an admin patch (what was I thinking!?!) without backing up the other files overall.  Supposedly the patch fixes a timeout issue with the content management system we use, so I just dropped the files in, and voila!  I was locked out of the system and kept getting invalid sessions.  I have no idea what finally fixed it – I tried backing out the fix, I tried reinstalling the entire set of files, I even upgraded the entire CMS.  None of that worked. 

I kept looking in the forums for help, came across a few ideas, and while I’m not sure what did the trick, the last thing I tried was resetting the security permissions.  That seemed to do it, so now I’m putting the permissions back the way they were.  Ugh.

Anyway, the site was completely offline for a while.  What was both maddening and reassuring was that the photo gallery and the blogs were all still working; even though they are partially controlled by the CMS.  I really am glad it’s back online and I will go and invest in some backup utilities. 

If you visited and could not move around the site, sorry about that.  I think we’re back now and the interesting part is that we have upgraded most of the site – as a result of my trying just about everything. 


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