Good intentions.
I was playing around with the site on Tuesday after posting the previous message.
Several themes had been downloaded, and played around with. To the point that I realized I was doing more damage than not.
So, I got this wild hair that I would reset the theme settings.
Doing some innerweb spelunking, the WordPress add-in WP Reset is recommended for this tasking. Obviously, I didn’t thoroughly read the documentation as WP Reset not only resets themes settings, it resets EVERYTHING, including deleting all the media on the website.
Luckily, I had done a site backup, but that was basically just the text, and all the links, no media.
In a panic I called 1and 1 and the tech said “no problem”. He did some to-ing and fro-ing and restored the version I had just created. That’s yesterday’s backup he said. No, that’s today. So he did some more to-ing and froing and was able to restore a version from September 2021. Some 2 year ago. After flailing around for a bit, he basically gave up on me and said call later and we can try again.
For fun, I decide to restore the version I had saved, and that got me back to the present day. A lot of the media was still lurking around, and I had some that I had backed up a couple of months ago.
But the media file structure is a mess, well and truly a mess. Looking at the site backup, it’s an XML file, it’s fairly well organized, so I can figure out most of what’s going on.
In the interim, I’ve got the site “mostly” working.
The big gotcha was I lost the custom CSS that one of the IT boffins at work had provided to add whitespace between the paragraphs. Doing some playing I figured it out. I’m going to put it here in case I screw this up again:
p {
padding-bottom: 20px
}
That’s it! Yay.
The lesson, painful as it was, is that I shan’t be doing website development on a live server again. I know better, but was too arrogant (stupid) to admit it to myself.
So, fair reader, stay tuned, and if you run into anything really weird, let me know.
cheers,