VFR formatting accident—everything ok now

A truly bizarre event occurred this morning at VFR. The entire formatting and layout of VFR’s main page changed by itself and went back to some generic default layout. The cause seemed to be that as I was trying to fix the recent display problem in the right column on the main page, I had come upon the command, “Refresh templates,” which I somehow thought was the equivalent of “Rebuild the site,” a perfectly routine command (and in any case “refresh” simply means refresh, right?), and I clicked it. Apparently clicking “refresh template” wiped out— without any warning or confirmation message—the existing templates and returned them to their pre-customized form. Fortunately, I had the customized templates backed up on my computer and was going to access them. But that would not have been ideal, as I had made more recent changes in the Main Index template without backing them up. However, I then discovered that backups of the Main Index template, the Master Archive Index, and the Style sheet had been automatically created this morning at the site, and those backups contained the correct code. So the site, in going back to the default templates, did not wipe out the existing, customized templates, but created backups of them. Thank heaven. I manually copied the backup of each template into its current template, and now all is well.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 05, 2007 11:49 AM | Send