Site Broken and Progressive Fix

Site Broken

With the latest WordPress major updates, the site is 'kinda' broken

Update - 2022-03-06

Site is more mobile responsive
Making better use of new Avada feature: Avada Layouts
- “Better” UI
  - Current post header
  - Progress bar at bottom

Pretty satisfied with the new Avada Layouts feature, fully customizable “sections”! A very welcomed addition/feature improvement provided by Avada

Site is looking more “modern” overall. They are still some old posts that show an external link snippet due to a retired wordpress plugin

Progressive fix...

My apologies for those visiting my "broken" site

I have decided to jump back to Avada and progressively fix the site

Started from scratch, migrating a local edit version of the site with Avada theme
Tutorial posts will get first priority
- Re-upload images etc
- Replace outdated content if any
Rest of the posts
Leaving out Gallery uploads entirely for now
- Still need to decide which Plugin to use

As the menu relies on Theme customizations, the outdated JS libraries were not updated to the latest WordPress requirements

Workaround: If you want to read my other posts, you would need to scroll all the way down and explore the post categories/tags

Most users reach this site for my LibreNMS tutorial anyway, so, if you are reading this post, thank you!

Unfortunately, it seems the Author for Eram Theme has completely disappeared. I had really good support in their early sales, but the company apparently got pulled in some country politics which led them to be pushed out of Envato/Themeforest entirely and moved to another Theme platform.

I don't blame them for not continuing, as a customer, just means I need to find another theme

Things come to an end

As with most hardwares, they do fail due to wear and tear, or technological advancements

When my site broke, I was in the process of retiring my first Synology NAS which was used to store photos. It felt fast then, due to a small amount of photos. Now it breaks a sweat when listing my archived photos

Softwares break too, like my website. Thought I would never need to make a major change to the website again, as I was pretty satisfied with the last theme migration

Good things come to an end

CMS Choices choices

Headless

Recently I have been coding with Python/JS and came across many headless solutions that sounds great. Server rendered pages in Nuxt/Next for eg. If I were to go with the more "technical" headless route, this would change how this site is run (currently on a shared host). I could keep the WordPress backend, but need to deploy another Server to render/serve the pages

One of the reasons for considering a headless route is so that I could have full customization on the site and not rely on Plugins. A decent WP website installs a minimum of 5 plugins, excluding Theme included plugins

All sounds nice and all, going headless means I will need to visit almost all aspects of the site like design/CSS, domain A names, SSL certs etc

Switch to a Major Theme

Move back to Avada as the main theme? Avada has been churning frequent updates. If we don't look at whether the Theme has features that match your requirements, if I had chosen Avada as the long-running theme a few years back, this major WordPress update and its issues would have been fixed by updating the Theme plugins by Avada

Not all pretty - Gallery required

The reason Eram was chosen was that it had a gallery plugin that matched my requirements (although no random sort on images in the gallery)

So we still need a WP Gallery plugin to serve my photos

See this ongoing plugin search and reliance? Most major plugins like W3 Cache is free for my case, but a recent price check on the major Gallery plugins point to a monthly price model if I want more advanced features

In my case of a non-ads site, blog, I would like to keep upkeep costs to a minimum