7 replies to this topic

[tommr]

I am in a heck of a pickle.
I have been working on my "new" site for months now trying to switch from html and tables to wordpress and divs and css.
Today I was putting the finishing touches on the page that has the thumbnails for the wind chimes and I created a custom sidebar using "custom sidebars 1.0"
I named the sidebar and inserted the text for the hyper links. Then I went to the page I had just created and chose the new sidebar from the drop down window.
Then everything went crazy. My page looked unrecognizable and there were parts from different pages all pasted all over the place.
I went in and disabled the sidebar. No luck.
I then realized wordpress had somehow reverted to the default twenty ten theme.
I switched it back to the child them and the header and basic layout appeared but the menus were completely fudgged up and some were in the section of unused menus.
What a nightmare.

I do have a backup program and the static files are all there but the database looks like mumbo jumbo.
Can anyone recognize any of this or give me any idea of how I could import it? I know how to use the MySql admin but these files are nothing like what is in the wp database.

[DonnaFontenot]

What backup program do you have? You shouldn't really even need to "look" at the database. If you have a backup of it (possibly ending in .sql or .sql.gz or .sql.zip), then you should be able to use PHPmyadmin or cpanel to restore it. You could also ask your host if they can restore the most recent backup.

[tommr]

I know. The backup is from http://hmn.md/backupwordpress/
The files do not look like anything I could use and their site is not much help.
I am on the phone with my host right now. They are attempting to help but this really has me thinking that if my site can be trashed by a funky pluging then maybe I should go back to hard code or find a better way to do the custom side bars.
God knows I could have built 100 sites in the time I have spent.
My host has a backup from Saturday and they will restore it for $15.00 and send me a copy.

At any rate I will not be using that backup utility but instead I will manually back it up.
Thanks for looking.

[AbleReach]

If it got messed up when you were working on the sidebar, it's probably a problem with how you were customizing the sidebar = the funky plugin. Don't worry about one funky plugin. Next time you'll know to throw a little test data into a plugin to find out how it acts, before dedicating a good chunk of your day to it. Find another plugin or learn how to code what you want into the sidebars some other way. Manually delete the plugin and try again. If it still looks wrong after the plugin is deleted, either you did something else or you have other problems.

I almost never work on a live site. I set up a server like XAMPP on my desktop computer and do any coding or design work there A database import gets me whatever content already exists, not because I need a complete copy, but because it's nice to have examples of how the type of content the site has will look in whatever theme I am making. Changing the root in WordPress settings makes the realcomain.com become monday.com or whatever, so that I can easily click on wordpress-generated links and move around to see what design changes look like on different views. If I know I am going to be making a lot of changes that particular week, I'll set up several copies of the same site, with the root named for the day of the week - localhost/monday, localhost/tuesday. localhost/wednesday, etc. That gets me a backup of whatever the design looked like on Monday, for instance, if I totally screw up on Wednesday and either don't want to bother figuring out what I did, or can't do it easily, which gives me the option to decide to start over with a copy of whatever is in the Monday or Tuesday version.

[tommr]

I had been using the plugin for some time and it seemed to be stable.
Since I restored the database everything seems groovy but I intend to do some more testing before I spend anymore time.
( I wish this only took a chunk of the day. More like a chunk of the weeks )
I only need about 4 or 5 sidebars so I may try and figure out how to make it happen with out the plugin.
The main reason why I am working live is I do not have any idea of how to do it locally and my computers are iffy.
One thing for sure I will be doing backups manually instead of the backup plugin.

[tommr]

As long as you mentioned it, why not work on a live site?

[AbleReach]

If you mess up and are working on the live copy, the public can see what you do. If you mess up and are working on a private copy, the stress level is much less - the public can't see. If you are working on a private copy AND have another private copy as a backup, no matter what you do to the one you are working on, you still have the backup copy for comparison and peace of mind. Besides peace of mind, the process of finding out what went wrong is much, much quicker when you can compare results between more than one functioning version of the design/coding - you may even find yourself getting creative with what seems like pulling teeth right now. It's very hard to have a pleasant learning curve if you're busy guarding your backside from failure.

Whatever you are trying to accomplish, there will be several ways to go about it.

[AbleReach]

p.s. Which plugin are you using for your sidebar? Were you doing any hard coding in the sidebar when everything went nuts? Did you get any error messages? Had you made any changes at all to the theme, other than activation the plugin? Was the craziness you speak of on every view, and did you look at the code view to figure out if it was presenting within the sidebar html area?