Things certainly look… orange.

With my old web server (running Windows Server 2003) beginning to show its age, I decided it was time for an upgrade. I built a new Windows Server 2012 virtual server (using Hyper-V instead of VMWare for the first time) and spent the past few days migrating my sites over. For WordPress sites this includes migrating databases, locking down permissions, and all kinds of boring tasks. Unfortunately I didn’t have a good way to test how things were working without doing a few quick “live” tests and so that’s what I did. After everything was moved over I found two three things weren’t working: my old WordPress theme for RobOHara.com,a bunch of custom webcode I had written, and my forum theme. Ugh.

I solved the forum problem by picking a different theme. I wasn’t deeply attached to the one I was using. Easy win.

The custom code problem was perplexing. I broke the golden rule of changing multiple variables all at once — a new operating system, a new version of PHP, a WordPress upgrade — so tracking down the problem was a pain in the ass. After an hour of troubleshooting and narrowing down where things were failing I discovered that some of my old code contained shortcuts beginning blocks of PHP code (I didn’t have the word “PHP” following the question mark). It worked on the old server and doesn’t work on the new server — not sure why, but once I nailed down what was failing, updating the code was simple.

I never did figure out why my old WordPress theme was failing — it simply displays the header and then hangs. I searched Google and found a thousand people having that problem with a thousand different solutions. As midnight approached I decided the simplest solution for the time being was to implement another theme (thus all the “orange”). I loved that old theme and may work more on getting it to work in the future, but either way we’re back up and running for the time being.