Web Design

I've been stuck on PHP 7.1 for my Drupal-based sites because, for some unknown reason, upgrading to PHP 7.4 results in a server Error 500. This problem stumped me for a while, but I've recently found a work-around. I wouldn't exactly call this a "fix", but I'm hoping to upgrade to Drupal 8 (or 9, or 10), so I'm willing to live with a patch or workaround. Anyway, it turns out that the error was being caused by the following line in the settings.php file:

Many things irritate me, so take this post with a grain of salt, but I hate the fact every significant MacOS update breaks my development environment. The latest was a security update to Catalina, MacOS 10.15.7. I have learned to test things out (Apache/PHP/MySQL) immediately after these updates, and I discovered (again), that Apache was broken. Now, admittedly, this is because I am using a different version of Apache from the one distributed by Apple, and installed using MacPorts. So I guess this is just something I have to live with.

I've been using Drupal since version 5.2, but lately, I've really started to become annoyed with the framework. OK, not just lately, but more now than ever. Don't get me wrong, I love Drupal. It's just that everything is so complex, and what I really need is simplicity.

I started using the Codeigniter framework when it was still in its infancy. I understand that many folks have bailed in favor of more modern, comprehensive frameworks like Laravel, with which I've dabbled a bit myself. However, most of my sites are not mission critical or revenue generating, and web development is not a full-time job for me so maintaining my CodeIgniter sites is a practical option.

So for reasons too extensive to get into in this post, I decided to make the jump on my MacBook Pro from OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) to the latest OS X which at the time was 10.11 El Capitan. Prior to making this leap, I checked the compatibility of all my mission critical applications. Naturally, however, the upgrade came with many challenges when it came to setting up the local web application development framework. Apache was fairly straightforward, as was PHP 5.6. MySQL was another story.

Since Drupal 6 has reached end-of-life, I decided to dive in and upgrade the tech blog to 7.5. It wasn't nearly as smooth as all the minor updates, but I think I've managed to work out most of the kinks.

First off, the update.php script was throwing loads of "module not found" errors. Not sure why, but it doesn't seem to affect the actual performance of the site.

The next problem I had was due to my kludgy hack of the default "Garland" theme, which I fixed by resetting my custom logo selection under Appearance, then reloading the logo.