What Are You Doing Right Now

JaredBusch

Spent a busy day digging deep into this Asterisk to FreePBX migration. Migrated all of the extensions. Total count 946 or something like that.

Setup 3 phones to test EPM. They have old Aastra 6737i phones. Mitel bought Aastra ages ago.

The entire thing has to be turned into a scripted process before I can even run a limited go live test.

The extensions were the easy part.

scottalanmiller

@dave_c said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Web developers with no idea:
4. They demand cPanel access. And the clients authorize that access (out of my pay grade)
5. The mess with DNS, really, why?
6. They choose poor plugins

Why are your web designers even being brought in under these conditions?

I'm not a fan of cPanel or its ilk, I think that this makes web sites harder to maintain.

Why are designers choosing plugins?

This sounds like deeper issues with letting the wrong people do the wrong tasks.

Your IT team needs to be managing the platform, you can't just throw IT tasks over to the art team and expect the artists to know what they are doing. If you treat WordPress like the enterprise application that it is, I think that you'll find none of these issues exists. If you treated anything in this way, desktops, servers, databases, etc. you'd have loads of issues from random non-IT people breaking things that they don't understand.

IT should be ...

Not allowed designers like this have any say in what goes on.
Maintaining the platforms properly themselves.

Problems can still arise, but the rarely do.

JaredBusch

@dave_c said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller
How do you catalog this?
This page isn’t working xxxx.com is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 500
It is caused by Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer plugin

Plugin, not WP.

Yeah it means the site is down too, but the cause is not WP.

scottalanmiller

@dave_c said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller
How do you catalog this?
This page isn’t working xxxx.com is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 500
It is caused by Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer plugin

That's a PLUGIN issue caused by something that is absolutely not Wordpress. That's like having a bad app and blaming Windows.

scottalanmiller

@dave_c said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@tonyshowoff
Absolutely. I am slowly "forcing" the move from cPanel to Linux without a control Panel. So far, the sites moved are working very well

We did that, much improved. Faster site, lower cost, easier management. No idea why people want cPanel.

dave_c

@JaredBusch
Awesome, platform migration and 900+ extensions in that time!
My record is 500+ extensions from Asterisx to Yeastar

JaredBusch

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@dave_c said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller
How do you catalog this?
This page isn’t working xxxx.com is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 500
It is caused by Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer plugin
That's a PLUGIN issue caused by something that is absolutely not Wordpress. That's like having a bad app and blaming Windows.

But I like to blame Windows....

scottalanmiller

@JaredBusch said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@dave_c said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller
How do you catalog this?
This page isn’t working xxxx.com is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 500
It is caused by Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer plugin
That's a PLUGIN issue caused by something that is absolutely not Wordpress. That's like having a bad app and blaming Windows.
But I like to blame Windows....

Me too.

Shakes fist at the window.

JaredBusch

@dave_c said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@JaredBusch
Awesome, platform migration and 900+ extensions in that time!
My record is 500+ extensions from Asterisx to Yeastar

Oh this will be March before I am done most likely. I just got serious today.

Yesterday was putting tools in places and comparing data.

StuartJordan

I'm not going to slag off Wordpress, I think it's good, you just need to make sure that you limit logins and keep it up to date. I use it myself and love what you can do with the platform.

tonyshowoff

@scottalanmiller In my experience those who want cPanel, not those forced to install it by some jackass admin or something, tend to because they lack confidence and experience with configuration and management within the Unix world.

scottalanmiller

@StuartJordan said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I'm not going to slag off Wordpress, I think it's good, you just need to make sure that you limit logins and keep it up to date. I use it myself and love what you can do with the platform.

And not add bad things on top of it. A bad theme or plugin is part of the code and going to break things.

We very carefully only use a few, tested, trusted, maintained plugins. Gotta keep it lean.

scottalanmiller

@tonyshowoff said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller In my experience those who want cPanel, not those forced to install it by some jackass admin or something, tend to because they lack confidence and experience with configuration and management within the Unix world.

Exactly the people who shouldn't be managing servers

cPanel... letting you do things you don't know how to do so you can up the ante for when the disaster finally strikes.

StuartJordan

@scottalanmiller Completely Agree!

dave_c

@scottalanmiller
You are technically right.
Point 3 tries to imply that WordPress is an ecosystem. One in which even quality plugins have problems. In this case, the plugin is well developed, known and used. Still crashed the site on an update

To be fair, I do not know the details of the crash . I just investigated and found that disabling the plugin solves the problem. But it seems like the plugin is necessary to continue the design of the site. Again, Catch 22

scottalanmiller

@dave_c said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller
You are technically right.
Point 3 tries to imply that WordPress is an ecosystem. One in which even quality plugins have problems. In this case, the plugin is well developed, known and used. Still crashed the site on an update

Well, only so good. You can say it is an awesome plugin, but it isn't that awesome. That's it's good, sure, I'll buy that. But under no condition can you blame the platform for a bad choice, decision, or problem from the ecosystem. No amount of software written to run on Windows being bad is a reflection on Windows. Yes, it can be seen as "part of the ecosystem", but that's not a reflection on the platform.

Bottom line, WordPress is stable and loads of the ecosystem is stable. It sounds like what you want is the "Apple Store" effect where the primary vendor blocks any software that they don't test and only sell you things that they want you to have.

scottalanmiller

@dave_c said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

To be fair, I do not know the details of the crash . I just investigated and found that disabling the plugin solves the problem. But it seems like the plugin is necessary to continue the design of the site. Again, Catch 22

Sure, but the Catch-22 is caused by something other than WordPress. Whoever is in charge of this site is responsible for creating (or allowing the creation) of the dependency; not Wordpress. This is not a problem that the rest of us are having, it's not a common one. We don't have a dependency on that plugin (I've never seen it in fact), and the plugin dependencies are a top decision factor in any design decision.

There is an issue here, yes. But that issue, the problem you are having, is in house on your end (and to some degree, with the plugin maker perhaps.) The issue isn't WordPress itself or even the ecosystem. It might be the designer, but someone had to hire that designer and approve their decisions. This is an IT task so whether IT itself or a shadow IT department, someone in IT over there is making calls that resulting in the issue that a bad plugin is now seen as a dependency.

dave_c

@scottalanmiller
Again, you are correct. I still don't like things WordPress does. Like storing URLs in the database. After using Craft CMS or ProcessWire WordPress does not make much sense

scottalanmiller

@dave_c said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller
Again, you are correct. I still don't like things WordPress does. Like storing URLs in the database. After using Craft CMS or ProcessWire WordPress does not make much sense

Where would you want them to be stored?

JaredBusch

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@StuartJordan said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I'm not going to slag off Wordpress, I think it's good, you just need to make sure that you limit logins and keep it up to date. I use it myself and love what you can do with the platform.

And not add bad things on top of it. A bad theme or plugin is part of the code and going to break things.

We very carefully only use a few, tested, trusted, maintained plugins. Gotta keep it lean.

https://i.imgflip.com/2r8ewa.jpg