The new Linux Rain is Here... well, sort of, almost
By Andrew Powell, published 01/09/2014 in Announcements
You might have noticed that The Linux Rain has taken on a whole new look. If you had of tried the beta version of The Linux Rain the new look would look very familiar. So, are we now running a whole new shiny CMS (content management system)? Well, not quite. Not yet anyway. Here's why.
It's a whole new look but in fact we're still on the old faithful KirbyCMS engine.
Why?
Sadly (and typically towards the time it was about to be finally migrated over) the beta version of the upcoming Wordpress-powered version of the started giving some problems, the main one I shall detail below.
The Issue
The nasty little sudden error in the "new" Linux Rain. Thanks to our resident author Bob Mesibov for the screenshot and initially bringing the problem to my attention.
Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded... was the halting message of doom that plagued the beta for a few days. It was sudden and completely unexpected. Honestly absolutely zero back-end code had changed - indeed my local development version on my machine was still working absolutely fine, with the identical code.
I did eventually narrow down the problem to being specifically triggered whenever Wordpress' thumbnail function was called. The error in question isn't terribly rare, which any web search would tell you, and as such there are plenty of "solutions". One of the main so-called fixes is to extend the max execution time of PHP, the server-side language that powers Wordpress (and many other CMS' for that matter, Kirby included) but the issue was that the error was triggered even while trying to display a single tiny thumbnail!
So with the conclusion that 30 seconds alone is more time than should be required to execute the function, I figured something may have gone wrong with the database or perhaps an uploaded image file had somehow ended up with a duplicate name/ID and sent the thumbnailer into a constant spin, which some search results on the net had indicated to me is possible.
Ultimately I had very little luck finding any such evidence of that kind of problem, even delving into the database itself. I even ran some problem finding tools available for Wordpress as plugins, such as plugins that find and delete duplicate data, but seemingly nothing made any difference...
The Fix
Well, to say there was a fix would be dishonest. Truthfully, a couple days after fighting with the error, all of sudden I literally woke up one day, loaded the site in my browser and... it was working again. And has been since.
So, what happened? Well, I don't honestly know for sure. I can only assume it was a glitch on the hosting server, although whatever it may have been, it only affected Wordpress. After all, the normal (Kirby-powered) version of The Linux Rain hasn't missed a beat and has been also generating thumbnails with no issue, the entire time.
Where to now?
Well, the entire Wordpress migration will be held off for a little bit longer, to make sure any and all errors are hopefully gone and that particular error perhaps just an aberration.
In the meantime though, I figured that for our readers the most important thing is the content and how it's presented. With that being the case, I decided to take the visual theming of the new Wordpress version of The Linux Rain and apply it to the existing site, which is what you can see now. So while some of the user features that the Wordpress migration brings are not here yet, at least things look nicer. And when the migration does happen, it should be even less jarring.
In any case, stay tuned for more content! We have more command-line tutorials courtesy of Bob Mesibov, the recently released Linux-compatible game The Journey Down: Chapter Two will be reviewed and a look at Elementary OS Freya Beta, just to name a few.