Spiral by Sven Geier

Our project took a back seat in 2009 and the site sat dormant for many months. Life gets in the way, as they say.

April brought us back to the table, with a previous WordPress (WP) reinstall overwriting the custom theme. So we begin again.

First, a bit of housekeeping.

WP was upgraded to the latest build v2.9.2. Four plugins were upgraded. The “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” plugin was removed, since an automatic upgrade function is built-in since WPv2.8 .

24 fictional Users created by bots and held in moderation for approval were deleted.

From there, the site theme had to be rebuilt entirely. The layout is a custom design based on the extensible  Tarski framework. The reinstall mentioned earlier wiped out the custom styles and page configurations with Tarskiv2.5.  With a new release, the theme was upgraded to v2.6 to begin the custom layout rebuild.

After searching many old CD’s from the months surrounding the original work back in August 2008, it became apparent that backup files for the final custom design were nonexistent.

Only the custom image files and screen shots could be found to work with. Fortunately, the custom work for the The Next Generation of Sitebuilding (TNG) installation we used to create the genealogy portion of the site remained intact, so some elements of the layout were easier to deduce from that part of the site, including dimensions, color scheme and typography.

The custom style sheet was rewritten from scratch. All posts and pages were missing and had to be recreated. Navigational links were rebuilt. Much left to do, but new beginnings aren’t always a bad thing.