Serves me right. That will teach me. Short cuts are not worth the time saving. Never let other do for you what you should do for yourself. Re-useable code is only reuseable if will always work. A stich in time ain’t worth a dime.

So, what brought on all the platitudes? Simple, the hosting service did me a big favor and upgraded the versions of PHP and MySQL to newer and “more powerful” versions and left me with a code versioning issue. Turns out that much of the software is written for this site used a “shortcut” in the PHP language and when they upgraded the PHP version the PHP people fixed the shortcut. Oops. What does that mean? well some of the software no longer works correctly. This is a bad thing, both on Pmachines part (the people who make the software I am using to run the site) and the PHP people for closing a very useful shortcut and not telling people about it up front.

The shortcut in question is an “Assign By Reference” procedure that is used in most languages, but now not by PHP (or at least not assigning the results of a results function) and that is causing all kinds of problems. In the “Category Lister” plugin that I wrote I called the very assignment that is now illegal. I have fixed it, but there are other plugins using the same call and in a more complex way and I need to fix them as well. You will notice that the recent comments list is “Out of Order” right now.

Worse, the error logs for the site are going nuts, but the site is still working on many levels. I will have to wait for a new version of the software to solve many of these issues but for now it will have to do. You should not actually see a difference in the site operation, most of the errors are in the namagement modules. Oh well, I do it all the hard way for now.