I have not yet resolved the arbitrary page display problem following the site upgrade earlier this week.  For an example of what I’m talking about, you may have noticed I removed the “Random Thought” link at the top of the front page that once pointed to the “About the Random Thoughts” page.  The reason is that the page will no longer display, although it’s intact and can be accessed administratively (although even through that interface it cannot be viewed, only edited).  The page can be accessed if I manually build the query URI instead of using the mod_rewrite rules to intercept the SEF URI and convert it to a real URI.  To see what I mean, try this:

The real link to the Random Thoughts about page is /about/site/random-thoughts/.  It should be accessible via this like:

http://www.xenogere.com/about/site/random-thoughts/

Sadly, that does not work anymore, and it’s still unclear why it doesn’t work (especially because other pages embedded at that level continue to function without incident).

The page can be accessed, however, if you use the real URI (post-rewrite) which is as follows:

http://www.xenogere.com/index.php?pagename=about/site/random-thoughts/

The problem is solely related to the new site engine.  If I utilize the original rewrite rules, it fails.  If I utilize the new rewrite rules, it fails.  The page, however, is intact and functioning normally, and no changes have been made to the server configuration that might interfere with the mod_rewrite functionality.  Frustrating, yes, but not the end of the world.  The problem has simply forced me to address an issue that I had thus far ignored (the organization of the static pages).

That being said, I’m now working on modifying the organization of the pages into something a bit less Byzantine that will hopefully resolve this problem (even if the underlying cause — bad programming — hasn’t been fixed).  Since I’ve wanted to reorganize those pages for some time, now I have a reason to stop ignoring the problem and do what I should have done long ago.

These changes will impact all of the “about” pages and everything that falls below them, in addition to the Random Thought archive and all of The Kids’ pages.  I will spin off all of them into different structures that are independent of each other.  This will also require some changes to the theme.

Likewise, there is still a problem with the post “e-mail” and “print” functions that is not related to the problem outlined above.  Monitoring of those functions shows that they’re rarely used, so I’m going to remove them to simplify the site and theme.  That also means one less thing to chase down following the upgrade.

I have resolved the comment notification issues, so that’s working normally now.  I’ve also resolved the problems with receiving trackbacks and pingbacks; the issue with sending them still exists.

Gee, at least I’m not bored, eh?

Update [10:36 AM CST]: Isn’t it just my luck that the first page I removed in this process, a page which I’ve never used but built in the hopes of one day using before giving up on the concept, appears to have resolved the entire issue.  I’ll play with this a bit more to ensure it has fixed it.  If so, I can spend a bit more time planning the reorganization before I do it.  Ugh!  This problem is truly entertaining due to its sporadic randomness and unpredictability.

Update [3:38 PM CST]: I was able to fix the print and e-mail functions on posts, so I’m leaving those in place.  I still need to modify each of those to resolve formatting issues.