Non-conforming Plugins / Theme - Start Fresh?

  • Dan
    • 8 posts
    October 31, 2018 12:08 AM EDT

    Greetings,

    I'll a long time user of SEPHP and have counted on the abilities of the plugin developers.

    I have purchased, from one popular developer(at the time):  8 main plugins and one template that we have currently installed.  I never guessed that the developer would stop
    staying current with the SEPHP version; but thats where we're at now.

    I have contacted them and they have upgraded only a couple plugins, with no further comment about the rest.

    QUESTION:  Is there an option to do a clean install of SEPHP 4.10 then import the data that I want to keep?   Users, Videos, blogs, forums, albums etc?  

    (And purchase a new theme from someone on the certified list)

    Note:  I did attempt to remove all the plugins and themes from my current 4.10 site;  however it went into unresponsive mode and I had to restore the entire site from backup.

    (Followed the instructions from the knowledgebase on removing plugins)

    Anyway, just thought I would ask for suggestions.

    Thanks!

    Dan

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    October 31, 2018 5:00 AM EDT

    Hi Dan - you could restore your current site to new condition by removing plugins but many of those would have modified the default tables and that's where the trouble lies. SES, SEAO and some others might offer services to do that and restore it to working order, I'm not sure.

    I know other clients have successfully installed fresh and imported but we don't recommend it due to the connections between various tables. You would need advanced knowledge or to seek expert help again. 

    I can guess who that expert is as I know of one former major one that didn't want to remove their callbacks and source edits to become certified. I'm sorry that happened to you. I do know how it feels as I lost a few thousand in "that other script" when I upgraded from v1 to v2 and those devs charged for the upgraded plugins though I had only bought them one week prior (was a new client). Not the same issue as yours but similar enough.

  • Dan
    • 8 posts
    October 31, 2018 9:08 PM EDT

    I think that one of my complications was the inactive widgets that interfered with modifying any layouts.

    It seems to be a game of whack-a-mole finding what needs to be removed.

    Maybe I should only remove the template and move on from there.

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    November 1, 2018 4:32 AM EDT

    Try that and yes, check widgets. 

  • gs
    • 857 posts
    November 1, 2018 2:28 PM EDT

    Did u try Disabling Plugins before attempting removal?

  • Dan
    • 8 posts
    November 4, 2018 2:36 PM EST

    Here's what I ended up doing,,,  probably way too much work, but it has solved my problem.

    I setup a development site, installed SEPHP most recent version fresh.

    Then installed all the SE plugins (most recent versions).  That gave me a base to work with.

    I purchased one of the certified themes and installed and configured to my liking.

    Now for the real work: 

    I exported certain tables from PHPMyAdmin from my original site.   Went through the painful work of comparing the database structure from the fresh site.  Then imported the selected database tables into my fresh site.

    There was a lot of hair-pulling when I needed to get my blogs to match up with my new USER-IDs, but I did finally get it.

    I have some work to do to match up the associate photos.

    I didn't restore the entire user base, since many spammers had crappified that.  I am able to distinguish my active members and will probably miss some, but thats not a huge problem to deal with.

    So, then I took the fresh site and moved it to production.  A few little issues with that transfer, but nothing horrible.

    Now the site is working and looks ten times better than before.  Now I start rebuilding traffic.

    The site is at www.iAntique.com

     

     

     

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    November 5, 2018 4:43 AM EST

    That's great that you were able to resolve it. Thanks for the detailed post. Nice site.I love antiques.

    • 71 posts
    November 26, 2018 3:43 AM EST

    Dan, the website appears to be down now. CDN problem?

  • Dan
    • 8 posts
    November 26, 2018 8:32 AM EST

    Hi Eugene,

    It's up.   Since we're primarily US based, we may block certain areas of the world that are sometimes problematic. 

     

    Dan

    • 71 posts
    November 26, 2018 9:07 AM EST

    Here is the message I get from Eastern Europe

     

     

    I believe it's a good practice to show some message in this case. Have you got spam bots from Europe? Our clients mostly get them either from some specific African country (not sure why) or from China (plenty of those for some reason)

  • Dan
    • 8 posts
    November 27, 2018 10:28 PM EST

    Eugene,  Europe isn't one of the areas that we filter out....  so now that I know where you're from, its a little more helpful.

     

    I've looked reviewed the IPs from Cloudflare, and made sure they are white-listed on the server.

     

    Hopefully, it fixes the problem.

     

    Thanks for letting me know.

     

    Dan