Developer trick out your site with some custom code? Awesome! What happens when he moves to Tahiti?
I just tried to upgrade Canvas (one of my favorite themes) on a site I worked on. But we also had some custom code in there. But where? Hmm, can’t remember. Aha, the upgrade broke the site. Somehow. Was it the CSS? The PHP? Are there custom files in there?
Did your developer move to Tahiti? Have fun trying to figure out his tweaks.
Of course, if we took deliberate notes and documented every step, we’d probably know what’s what. But still. Any tweak to a theme is just a that: a tweak. If it’s no longer quite the same as when the shrink wrap came off then it’s as good as anyone’s guess as to where to find the changes.
Sure, I’m up for some custom coding as much as the next guy! But what happens when I’m not around to fix what I tweaked? Or worse, your developer just isn’t anywhere to be found and you have to dig through a spaghetti of code just to try to get things working again. At the very least, if you’re hosted somewhere reliable (like WP Engine with automatic one-click restore) then it’s easy to get back to square one. But you want to get ahead to square two.
Anyone know the area code for Tahiti?
I have this exact problem. I tried contacting the guys whose names were on the site and got nowhere. It’s a school site and people volunteer to maintain it. Ugh! It’s working but were on WordPress 3.1.3 (I think 4.1 is out) and I see a bunch of php errors (I think) like ” Creating default object from empty value in /home1/deft123/public_html/wp-includes/user.php on line 657″.
I’m afraid to upgrade things for fear of breaking them. Maybe I’ll just wait until the school year is over or maybe I’ll move to Tahiti?
Love this site, I look at every post when I get notified. I am helping with another site and the article about godaddy made me think we might want to move.
Rick