Sigh... that moment when you notice something is wrong on one of your websites, and you login and discover that somehow **all of your plugins on your WordPress site were DE-activated**. 🤯
And of course because it is a multi-site WP installation... it means ALL of your other sites on that server are down.
And you wish you could call your IT department... except... that's YOU! 😞
Sigh.............
@karlauerbach Oh, yeah... flat files were how all my websites started back in the day. But over the past 20 years, I have enjoyed the convenience and power that WordPress offers.... but with the occasional challenge like this. 🙁
There are a couple of my older sites that I don't write on any more that I've been keeping around just for historical reasons that do NOT need WordPress at all. I may move them to one of the static site generators (or just a bunch of HTML files).
@danyork I took a look at two things - my websites and my age.
And I thought - someday I'm going to die and my digital legacy, much of which is on my website, will be difficult to preserve past my demise.
On top of that I tested whether I could restore from the backups of my then existing website - thus discovering that although I had backed up the mariadb database I had forgotten to back up the schema.
That's what landed me on Hugo - a simple directory of flat files that gets turned into a directory that can be tar/zipped-up and plopped into a web server (with it being easy to change the domain name.)
I am quite concerned that we have entered what future historians will call the new dark ages - in which everything was in digital form that will often vanish irrecoverably upon the first missed payment after a person's death.
Our Internet is designed for transience, not preservation. We need to rethink things like DNS & much else for their impact on preservation.
Dan York
Karl Auerbach