Need some new website options please.

Okay everyone. I am super fed up with wordpress and/or the divi theme. Every time I have to update a plugin or the theme, I get massive anxiety, and the updates are basically 4 times a week. Of course I have learned to not do “update all” that always crashes things. Today the site is partially down again with random errors.

So I think it is time to move on or maybe just stop using DIVI and make the site work with one of the default themes. The DIY of wordpress is awesome but is really becoming less and less reliable for me. Moving the site is going to be brutal and I only want to do it once preferably not at all.

Does anyone have some experience with this sort of thing and could recommend a new site framework? I can move to the shopify side and it seems pretty solid, perhaps a bit limiting but zero maintenance from me will be needed. I am sure the forums will need to stay here for a long while but the rest can get moved.

In digging around trying to spot issues I see a potentially big one. All sorts of stuff is leftover from plugins and other things I have used or tried over the many many years with wordpress. Old caching plugins and woocommerce stuff all still show up in the database. Is there a way to start fresh, without starting fresh in wordpress?

Ryan - do you perform backups before you process updates? It looks like your .htaccess file may be buggered. You may well have other issues, too, but your mod_rewrite rules do not seem to be finding the pages it needs to find. I realize you asked about alternatives for hosting, but perhaps I can assist you in getting your site restored for now so you don’t have to start over.

Casey

I think you need to get every one of these web experts in a slack channel and hash it out, in real time. Sort of a remote website hackathon.

AWESOME, thank you for that. I told the hosting tech support that the last dude messed with my htaccses and I was sure that was issue number one. They denied it.

I do have backups daily and usually before a template update…not today.

 

Yes, It is indeed time for a hackathon. This is getting sooooooo irritating.

The techs keep screwing with things they actually knocked out there own caching plugin this time.

Once I get this sorted Casey if you have time…and I know there was at least one other web/woordpress guru hanging around.

First tech says, you need to contact divi, htaccses is fine but your pages are missing…Sorry the pages are indeed there, I can still edit them in the backend

Hey,

I run a digital strategy/production company, and we deal with wordpress literally all day every day, including Divi-based sites… I just happened across this thread because I’m in the process of printing the last piece for my mpcnc.

Let me know if I can be of help.

Steve

 

Even if you don’t have a backup from today. The main .htaccess file in the root is not normally changed very often unless it needs to be changed for plug-in functionality. It uses regex to allow readable URLs. Bottom line, try get a copy of the .htaccess file in the root of your site (e.g. public_html) without restoring anything else.

Yes please!

 

I am guessing this will get resolved soon, but what can we do once this is working? If either of you want to email me with some type of ballpark prices or something I would love to have a set of trained eyes look over my very old mess.

I do not work with DIVI (as Steve mentioned), but I am willing to help if needed.

I do have access to that and previous ones. I will give the techs another half hour or so since I just emailed them this new info. I do not want to get into a mess with changing the same file as them.

The first thing I’d ask is where you have this hosted. Some hosts (WPEngine, for example) aggressively go through your filesystem looking for things that are “suspect”, and they wipe them without you necessarily ever knowing.

If they see anything that looks out of place, or hasn’t been whitelisted, they’ll just … wipe it… Like for a while, there were plugins that they would just wipe without a word.

Anyway, once you rule out some sort of automated thing, then wordpress should be pretty easy to maintain really. Aside from the regular updates which shouldn’t require more than a couple of button clicks, and a recurring backup using something like updraft, you shouldn’t really have to touch it.

I’m happy to talk through what’s going on, and what you might do to make your life easier moving forward.

Makes sense. I may not be correct in my assumption, but that is a place to start. The httpd logs should shed some light, also.

@Ryan - I was going to send you an email just now, but the contact page (where I assume your email would be) seems to also be offline at the moment.

If you want, you can hop in a discord channel I just set up. Casey you’re welcome as well.

 

 

HAHAHAH go figure…That is why I have not been flooded with emails about the site!

You can use Ryan at the current url.

You guys rock thank you!!!

Ryan, Not sure if you are still looking for another platform and if so you might want to take a look at DNN CMS this is an open Content Management System that runs on the .NET stack that is very flexible out of the box and also has a very active community that offers add-on/Models to extend the capability of the platform.

https://www.dnnsoftware.com/

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Use Flatsome! It is fantastic and much easier than Divi had has far less updates. I can help you setting up or make a demo, no problem!

Thanks but I don’t use woocommerce anymore.

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