I’m not a narcissist. I don’t think I need to look at this webpage every minute of the day. So, I often just let it ride for weeks before I look at.
Well, one time, after weeks and weeks of not looking, I discovered that the front end of the site was not working because the index.php file had ‘super’ locked permissions on the file and hard as I might, I could not get it to work. The backend worked fine, but could not see the front page if my life depended on it. So after several weeks of disappointment, a couple of hours of research, and just plain thinking about it while not looking at it, I replaced the index.php file with a client’s index.php file (these are always the same, since it is the content in the database and the template that define what the user sees) and the site began to work. YEAH.
On a related matter and for about a year now, I’ve been struggling with the simple task of editing the copyright tag in the template, using the WordPress widget for that. Well, it just refused to save. There’s a spinning wheel feature that just goes and goes and never saves or changes the content.
Then I noticed that the search function on the front page of the site didn’t work. Oh, and I couldn’t get the menu widget to load up the Famous category so I could make it more prominent. Arghh. Many, annoying bugs, or so it seemed!
Being fed up this week, I took it upon myself to ask my template provider for help in the Forums. They have an awesome forum service since there are thousands of installations and users. As it turned out, none had the problem of their Gantry Copyright widget not updating, so I submitted my problem and engaged, over several days in a dialog with Matt who gave me the diagnostic path to ultimately discover the source of the issue.
My host provider had set the .htaccess of my site to disallow access to the specific ajax script that enables effective operation of each of these services and one or two more that I didn’t think were relevant UNTIL I DISCOVERED THEY WORK NOW!
- Search – this hasn’t worked for months
- Gantry Copyright widget change – this was stuck on 2015 for all of 2015, but I didn’t notice until January 2016 when it wouldn’t accept the new year
- Search for New Plugins
- Add a new Category to the main menu – I thought this was somehow related to the data, but alas, it too was solved by removing the .htaccess restriction on that script.
