This website has just been upgraded to Silverstripe 2.4.0, which adds (amongst other things) hierarchical URLs. While the effort has been worth it, this upgrade was more problematic than previous ones due to version 2.4 including a cleanup of the API, and some rather major changes. Fortunately I now have a test server that I can do trial runs on before making changes to the live website. Here's a quick rundown of the problems that I experienced, and the solutions.

Today I noticed that no one could post comments on this website anymore. The Akismet module appeared to be stuck in an infinite loop, or at least taking too long. After 60 seconds of execution, a PHP script is cut off (note: this time-out is different on other web servers). Since I lack the time to investigate and fix this problem, Akismet is temporarily disabled.

Previously, this website was hosted one of Kiwihosting.net.nz's Unix (HSphere) servers. They now have newer, faster Windows servers that are Helm based. Not only are they faster, they currently also offer twice the bandwidth and disk space of the older hosting plans on their HSphere servers. They also offered six months free hosting to those who volunteered to move their websites to the new hosts without assistance. After some minor issues with this website over the weekend, I decided to move to the new hosts. To make things easy, Kiwihosting's staff had already created installation instructions for Silverstripe on the new servers.

Over the last day, several comments were posted to this blog that contained links to websites with very dodgy URLs. Essentially, all the links were to dirty websites that peddle content that I do not wish to see, or be associated with. Over the last week I have simply logged on regularly, and deleted any comments that were Spam. However, this still leaves a window during which that unwanted trash is visible on this website. This morning's dose of dirty spam motivated me to take the time to install Akismet, a comment spam filtering service.

This blog now uses FeedFlare to add "sharing" links to the bottom of every blog entry (see the bottom of this blog entry). FeedFlare is a feature of FeedBurner, which is a tool/service designed to help increase traffic to blogs. The idea behind FeedFlare is to make it easy for people to share blog posts with friends. For example, a Digg user can "Digg this" post, simply by clicking on the "Digg this!" link. No need for them to manually copy the URL. People are more likely to do something if it is easy and takes little time.

Whilst this site looked like it was working just fine, I was having some trouble with the CMS. For example, the security, comments and files & images administration pages weren't working. On the public part of the site, the blog tags and archive links resulted in "page not found" errors.