Spring cleaning of the OAM website

Dear OAM community,

The website of the OpenAndroMaps will be dusted a little bit in the next days (it’s raining 😉 ).
A tedious and time-consuming work, but, especially with WordPress, it is inevitable from time to time.

Why:

We have now PHP +7 / MySql 5.7 on the server side and not every WordPress plugin can do that.
Which means that old plugins that have not been maintained for years have to be eliminated or replaced.
Only when this is done WP and the theme itself are able to be updated.
Unfortunately, the plugin that generates the dynamic download tables is also one of these deliverables – finding a replacement here will be a challenge.
If someone has experience with the FOO-Tables under WP+5 (doesn’t work or what has to be done) I would be grateful for any help.

For now, the SocialMedia plugin (Shariff) has been eliminated and replaced by the function that is now integrated into the Enfold theme. There is _no_ communication with FB/Twitter/Instgramm/etc – only a “stupid” link is set. This corresponds to my idea of a clean website.

Another, very practical plugin, is/was the CrayonSyntaxHighlighter for source codes that are formatted very nicely and readably. Unfortunately this plugin has not been updated for 4 years and there is no adequate replacement that would be worth the program overhead. So these elements (program snippets in the majority) are now displayed as PRE-formatted text.

And so on, the list is quite long…

What does this mean for you:

I have to replace some elements on all pages and then check ALL pages and posts for consistency. Furthermore all caches+CDN have to be switched off from time to time.
Which means that the website will be (sometimes) very, very slow – this can’t be avoided because the WordPress Backend (Admin) consumes a lot of resources.
So if you see a “Gateway Error No [something]” please understand a webmaster who is trying to keep his inner center while restarting the server.

Best regards
Christian

In the meantime you can download Michael’s maps to your smartphone, they have reached a level of perfection that will amaze you: