Not worth the Stress

Today was a particularly hard stressful day for me; I had a client who sent me changes overnight that needed to be completed by close of day plus I had a small addition to add to another site today. I started on what I thought was an easy list of changes but right in the middle was a sentence that read “The emailing functionality on the form isn’t working”.

Oh dear now that was a critical component in this digital marketing page. I checked the form, and then checked all the other forms on the site and all gave the same errors.

After checking that nothing wrong with the code, I then checked the mail server side, nothing wrong. Well my next thought was the mail plug in to the CMS might have gotten corrupted, so I deleted it and re-loaded, still a problem. The error code was just telling me that the mail was not being sent. After narrowing down all the oblivious issues it had become a needle in a haystack.

Quickest solution was try another mail plug in, but this one said that it had sent the mail but after waiting the required time, whatever that was, no mail arrived at its destination, in fact nothing was sent. So I tried a number of other mail plug ins, all said that the mail was sent but nothing arrived.

Next was to reload the CMS, so I did a full backup and a database backup, deleted the CMS, and reloaded a fresh version, then found that the full backup was too big to load, I had to find a work around which I finally managed, then tried the original mail plug in and it still did not work.

I was chest fallen, about to call the client, something was wrong with the CMS and was in the full backup. My last ditch attempt was to clean up the server, reload once again the CMS and try the database backup.

And it work, that the Lord, I just walked out onto my patio, cracked open a beer, and collapsed onto the deck chair.