Just to keep you all updated on what is going on, today was an "insult to injury" kind of day.
Last night, after over 8 straight hours of working on the new article system, the developer of the software went completely sideways on me. And when someone gets sideways, I get sideways right back. Let's just say, this didn't end very well. But, I thought what the hell, I will keep pressing on. So lets get down to the issues as of right now. Oh, and remember 'why' I created this site? So that people that are completely new to the hobby can ask questions without being called every name under the sun? Just an FYI, that is what happened to me last night when I was asking HIM questions about HIS software. THAT is what set him off. Me asking him a simple question... It's pushing me to become a developer... But I will never be that smart unfortunately...
Anyway...
While I was setting the articles section up I noticed that every single article that I was putting in there was showing up on the index page (this is what set him off). I told him what it was doing with it posting all articles on one page regardless of settings or what category I had placed it in, it was always showing up on the main page. This is where he went sideways after 8+ hours of work. No resolution, no 'this is how you do it', nothing! Just him going off on me like I was a red headed step child.
Fine.... If that is the way you are going to be, I will just dig a little deeper into your software and figure it out for myself. Because lets face it, this site needs an article section...
So I wake up today and start doing a little more work. There is absolutely NO WAY to keep ALL of the articles from showing up on the main page. I thought it was something that I did so I decided to just delete the add on from the site but that is when I found out that it MODIFIES the original threads that were promoted to an article! It takes all of the text that was in the original thread and puts it into a quote, which was set to a default setting of 5 characters. That means if this post that you are reading right now was one of the promoted articles, the quote would contain "Ju..." and THAT'S IT!!! The 5 characters INCLUDES the 3 periods!!! And there were MULTIPLE threads like this. Oh yea, fire was coming out of my head on this one.
Thankfully I was able to go into the AMS, select ALL of the articles (since they were ALL on the SAME FRIGGIN PAGE!!!) and I was able to send them from the AMS back to a forum I created that is out of sight. And this worked, but now, we have duplicate threads... We have the modified ones in the Articles Node (the forum section with all of the old articles, over 200 of them) AND they are also in the new section I created.
I decided that maybe, just maybe "I" was the cause of all of these issues and maybe I should start over. So I went into the database tables and HOLY CRAP, there were 25 tables for AMS alone!!! I had already uninstalled it from the forum, and now, I am deleting the tables associated with it so that I can reinstall it. Tables dropped AND IT DELETES THE ORIGINAL THREADS!!!!!!!! This craptastic software actually MOVED the original threads from being associated with the forum database TO THEIR DATABASE!!! Very glad I made a backup of all of this crap!!!
Whatever, I have saved the threads from getting deleted so lets reinstall all of this to see if I did something wrong (lets face it, most of the time it's my fault, just ask my wife...). So the files are on the server, I install the .xml file and go in and set the permissions so that I could see it and edit it. Done. There was already one category on there so just to see if it would put everything BACK on the home page, I created another category and I pushed one article into each of the categories. This time though, I unchecked the box for it to modify the existing threads (this is a good and a bad thing. Good thing is it doesn't modify the original thread. Bad thing is now it's not associated with the article).
And even still with COMPLETELY DEFAULT SETTINGS, both of the articles showed up on the index page!!! He blamed this issue on ME when it was HIS coding that caused it. It was at this point that I decided to just say screw it, I reverted the articles back into threads, uninstalled it and went to the database to delete the 25 tables.... Well, I had a hard time finding the tables because there were not 25 tables, there was ONLY ONE FRIGGIN TABLE this time.
Needless to say, that software is way over complicated for what it does. It had some great options that would have done great here on the site, but everything about it is made to where you have to know a LOT about how everything works on the back end just to use it.
So now we are back to step 1, we have no article system and the forum REALLY needs one. Man I wish I could take this file and ACTUALLY BURN IT!!!! Hitting delete on this POS just isn't enough...
There you go guys, that is what I was doing ALL day yesterday as well as most of the day today. And it was all for NOTHING. Starting back at step 1 again....
