Cory D. Boatright, PhD

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Hopefully this takes care of the strange errors around the site, which was a result of the framework I have been using for years (Expose) not being maintained, thus losing compatibility with Joomla itself.  The new framework, Gantry 5, is better maintained but is also more hands-on when it comes to tweaking the appearance of the site.  Someday I'll get the motivation up to alter things that annoy me about the new theme, but this will work for now.

A recent Joomla update seems to have corrupted some database tables and caused errors all around the site.  While I finally figured out how to fix one of the errors, there is a lot of other unexplained behavior that I either didn't notice before or has recently occurred.

One aspect of trying to fix the page included using a backed up copy of the site which was missing the latest posts and the reorganization of the menu bar above.  Good times.

I haven't updated the other pages on the site yet, but I left the college June 30th of this year.  This is any readers' formal notification to that effect, since I'm not sure when I'll get around to editing the other pages around the site that might reference employment there.  I just don't want to cause any confusion for anyone!

I've updated the various "about me" pages and reorganized the menu items.  I still have to review how Joomla autogenerates things like page URLs and how it uses aliases/slugs on the backend to refine some aspects of the site that most would probably consider borderline OCD.

My previous timeline is completely trashed because I pretty much checked out this summer instead of working on most of my personal projects, which includes this site.  I will probably pull the blog off of the home page and make something static instead, followed by making the blog something a user would have to specifically access.  Then I can put my more philosophical/political ramblings somewhere other than Facebook, which relabeled me "ultraconservative" without my knowledge at some point.

  1. Fill in summaries/outlines for eventual content of the mostly static pages.
  2. Repair/remove/replace broken links or categories.
  3. Add media content.
  4. Work on the calendar.
  5. Add new pages as needed.
  6. Work on site layout.

I'm ballparking about 1 month per phase, with phase 6 taking much longer.  Hopefully this finally gets things moving on here.