When our previous host experienced equipment issues that impacted our clients, it caused a significant disruption. With the wonders of the internet we were able to recover much of what was lost.

One of our star recoveries has been Surveyors Lexicon, a marine surveyor’s reference library of over 2000 marine terms and regulations.

Given a chance to update sites and (potentially) migrate them to WordPress, I tested two plugins that purported to be able to do what my original programming had done. Sadly, both were a complete fail. One didn’t test the database content to produce the menu (I stopped testing at this point) and the second failed even harder; populating the index with unnecessary and unwanted data, failing to display the menu unless something from the index was selected and (this is the three strikes thing, but not the last issue) couldn’t truncate the index to a selected prefix. Ugh, just ugh. Load times were truly horrendous because all the data (including truly extensive descriptions) was displayed regardless of what was selected. Navigation was a nightmare.

Given the lack of satisfaction with the available plugins, I pulled out my original programming, brushed off the dust, upgraded the scripting from php5.4 to php7, added a few bits of script to improve the search and prefix selection functions and voila! The site is up, working perfectly, with all data restored. What’s not to like about that?