ICEWEBRING

Links temporarily down

I just discovered that due to a recent update to the Links Library Plug in, the links on the site are temporarily unavailable. I need to fix a few category codes to get them back, which will hopefully occur sometime in the next week or so.

Updated code for PHP 7.0

It did turn out that mysql_connect and several other functions were deprecated between PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0. I’ve gone through my scripts and updated them to use the new APIs that are supported by PHP 7.0 and reset the default back to PHP 7.0. Things seem to be working okay so far, and supposedly PHP 7.0 should give a significant speed improvement. We’ll see.

Product List back up, for now.

After trying several new PHP plugins I still didn’t have any luck in getting the Product List and the Recent Releases list working. I had tracked things down to the point that it would hang up with it hit the $connection = mysql_connect($host,$user,$password) or die ("couldn't connect to server"); portion of the script.
Eventually I went into the Dashboard for my website that my host provides and saw that my site was set to use PHP 7.0. It gave me the choice to use PHP 5.6 instead and once I switched to that, things started working again, even with the new plugin.
I’ll have to do some research on whether it is the plugins (I tried several) that can’t handle PHP 7.0 or if it is my underlying code that needs updating for PHP 7.0

Product List down

The trusty Plug-in that allows execution of Php code in my pages has failed, and in fact, took down the entire site for a few days. It’s been disabled, but that means that the Product List and several other features won’t work until I have time to find a replacement, since it doesn’t seem to be supported anymore.

Harp Folkways

With roughly 70% of the book being rules agnostic, HARP Folkways is a great buy whatever system you play.
I’ve been seeing good things about this book, I’ll give it a read when I get a chance but I’m hoping to get a paper copy first. I like pdfs for reference, but still prefer paper for an initial read through.
HARP Folkways

Bladestorm Rulesbook 2nd Edition now available

After 25 years, Bladestorm has now been updated and released in a Second Edition.
BladestormRulesbook 2nd Edition Bladestorm Rulesbook 2nd Edition

Cleaning up files

I’ve been going through and deleting old files off of the site, hopefully they aren’t being used anymore, but if you get a page not found error, please let me know, I’ve got backups of everything, just in case 🙂

Change of Theme - Part 3

I solved the final problem with getting the Title Tag to show what I want. I had to add an override of wp_title in the same plugin that I wrote to handle the variables. I got hung up for awhile trying to get it to work and eventually figured out that I needed to turn off “Use Bytes for All SEO options” in “Configure SEO” in the “Atahualpa Theme Options”. Works quite nicely now.
Now I can get back to editing my pages after taking a week long diversion to deal with tables that weren’t working the way I wanted 🙂

Change of Theme – Part 2

Okay, the challenge of moving the Product pages to be within WordPress in the new theme was too tempting to pass up on, and after a couple of days of experimenting and some help from the “Atahualpa” forums I’ve got it working. I didn’t need to define a new template page or anything. It did however change all of the page addresses, as I suspected it would.
I’ve managed to implement this new method while leaving the old method available so any links that I haven’t updated yet, or from outside pages will still pull up valid Product Pages. Best of both worlds 🙂
One problem I still have to solve is that under the old method I could change the Title Tag, which is what shows up in the tab in browsers. With the new method it stays as the generic “Product_Page << ICEWEBRING" instead of getting changed to the Product Name. I've posted it as a question on the forums, hopefully someone has a solution that doesn't involve manually editing the header.php file in the theme, which seems to be the best solution I could find using Google.

Change of Theme

I’ve switched the WordPress theme that I’m using from “F2” to “Atahualpa”. “F2” worked well except it wouldn’t handle wide tables properly, instead of compressing the sides and wrapping the text within the cells, it would simply chop off the right hand side of the table.

The “Athahualpa” theme handles the wide tables well, although I’m having trouble getting some smaller tables to center in a some of the posts, and it handles the custom php trickery that I’m doing to get my product pages to display. I do lose the right hand sidebar on those, when I try and add it I just get a text version of the sidebar contents above the entry for the product, but it’s not a big deal to have it missing on those pages.
“Athahualpa” is also highly customizable, I’ve barely scratched the surface with what can be done with it.
This is still all part of my project to get rid of as many of the php, pdf, and other document pages as possible and get them all converted into regular WordPress pages.
The other advantage is that “Athahualpa” doesn’t have a maximum width which “F2” does.

In theory, I think there are ways that I could change the Product pages from being a call with a parameter from a WordPress page to an outside PHP page that tries to pull in the WordPress headers and sidebars to some sort of WordPress Template page that could accept the parameter and pull the information from my product database while staying within WordPress. Most of the solutions I’ve seen so far look like they would be a lot of work to get going, and would likely change all of my page addresses(again). Someday I will attempt it, but I have lots of other things to fix up first.

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