https://pier.abn.company/blog/ Practical writing on legacy websites, FTP, MySQL and AI-assisted edits. en © 2026 A Brand New Company B.V. Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:23:38 GMT pier-blog-bot https://pier.abn.company/logo.svg https://pier.abn.company/blog/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/joomla-akeeba-action-logs-fix/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/joomla-akeeba-action-logs-fix/ A routine Akeeba restore. A blank white 500. Forty minutes of grep, schema reconstruction and one quiet INSERT later, the Joomla 4 site was back. Joomla Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:23:37 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/php-74-to-82-audit-checklist/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/php-74-to-82-audit-checklist/ You said yes to the PHP 8.2 jump on a ten-year-old WordPress install. Before the maintenance window opens, here is the audit that keeps it boring. PHP Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:27:57 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/drupal-watchdog-severity-queries/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/drupal-watchdog-severity-queries/ The dblog admin page caps at 50 rows and aggregates nothing. The watchdog table itself answers the questions the UI cannot. Three columns and four queries. Drupal Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:37:44 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/wp-config-debug-constants/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/wp-config-debug-constants/ A site lands in your inbox: SFTP creds, vague symptoms, no documentation. Before reading a line of someone else's plugin code, we set nine wp-config constants. WordPress Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:49:41 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/wordpress-multisite-plesk-vps-migration/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/wordpress-multisite-plesk-vps-migration/ A Plesk box on PHP 7.4 with a 12-site multisite, a fresh VPS waiting at Hetzner, and a Sunday from 09:00 to 17:00 to get the cutover done before Monday traffic. WordPress Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:01:03 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/symfony-6-intranet-migration/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/symfony-6-intranet-migration/ Eleven weekends, one strangler proxy, and a timesheet form that never went dark. How an in-house team moved a 2011 custom-PHP intranet onto Symfony 6 without anyone noticing. Migration Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:05:12 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/magento-2-cron-schedule-bloat/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/magento-2-cron-schedule-bloat/ A Magento 2 shop's cron_schedule table hit 14 million rows on a Friday afternoon. Here is the prune, the lock duration we accepted, and the indexer config that stopped the regrowth. Magento Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:13:18 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/contact-form-spam-incident-response/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/contact-form-spam-incident-response/ 23:41 on a Tuesday. A legacy WordPress contact form just became an open relay and the host has fifteen minutes of patience. Here is the thirty-minute IR. Security Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:20:22 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/wordpress-nonces-fundamentals/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/wordpress-nonces-fundamentals/ The form works in the morning, breaks in the afternoon, and nobody can reproduce it on demand. The bug is in how you read what wp_verify_nonce returns. WordPress Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:25:54 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/oscommerce-to-woocommerce-migration/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/oscommerce-to-woocommerce-migration/ A 14-year-old osCommerce store moved onto WooCommerce in six weekends. The URL map, the specials-to-sale-price bridge, and the SEO that kept its rankings. Migration Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:38:22 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/php-fpm-pool-sizing-vps/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/php-fpm-pool-sizing-vps/ A WooCommerce shop crashes at lunch. PHP-FPM is at 100% pool capacity and the host wants you to size up the VPS. Before you click, here's the math. Operations Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:49:40 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/magento-ai-copy-staging-shape/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/magento-ai-copy-staging-shape/ A read-only staging mirror is the cheapest insurance against AI-generated product copy that overwrites the wrong SKU in a 2014-vintage Magento store. AI Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:59:34 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/legacy-site-handover-audit/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/legacy-site-handover-audit/ You inherited a WordPress site from another agency. The code looks fine. Then the SSL silently fails on a server nobody mentioned. Here is the audit we run. Workflow Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:07:35 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/cache-control-leaked-php-sessions/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/cache-control-leaked-php-sessions/ At 16:47 a customer screenshotted someone else's order history in his own dashboard. The bug was a Cache-Control header on the PHP account page, missing one word. PHP Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:18:55 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/joomla-extensions-table-field-guide/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/joomla-extensions-table-field-guide/ Six columns in #__extensions tell you everything Joomla actually loads. A field guide for the moment you take over a site whose admin won't open. Joomla Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:28:09 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/mysqldump-flags-legacy-mysql/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/mysqldump-flags-legacy-mysql/ The .my.cnf and mysqldump flags we drop on every legacy MySQL box before an export, and the three that have saved a restore at two in the morning. Databases Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:36:41 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/drupal-7-static-cloudflare-pages-playbook/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/drupal-7-static-cloudflare-pages-playbook/ Drupal 7 reached end of life. You inherited one. Here's a two-hour route to a static export on Cloudflare Pages with the contact form still working. Drupal Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:47:38 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/magento-sales-order-grid-shrink/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/magento-sales-order-grid-shrink/ A Dutch agency we work with had a sales_order_grid pushing 4GB after Black Friday. Here is the staged shrink that took it back to lean, with every archived order intact. Magento Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:57:12 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/woocommerce-stripe-double-charge-hook/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/woocommerce-stripe-double-charge-hook/ Two payment intents, three seconds apart, same order, same card. An incident walkthrough of a duplicate woocommerce_payment_complete hook hiding in mu-plugins. WordPress Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:04:47 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/legacy-site-monitoring-stack/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/legacy-site-monitoring-stack/ Thirty legacy sites, one person, and a Sunday morning that started with a 'checkout broken since Friday' Slack. Four signals would have caught it on Thursday. Operations Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:10:05 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/statamic-migration-freeze-playbook/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/statamic-migration-freeze-playbook/ The staged content-freeze playbook for a five-day legacy-to-Statamic cutover: editorial lock, three diff checkpoints, the .htaccess that ships. Workflow Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:18:43 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/php-session-race-invoice-pdf/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/php-session-race-invoice-pdf/ A Dutch agency we work with rang at 23:41. Their custom-PHP billing portal had emailed the wrong invoice PDF to a customer. We blamed session_start for six hours. PHP Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:27:28 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/magento-1-chatbot-read-only-shape/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/magento-1-chatbot-read-only-shape/ A client wants a chatbot bolted onto a 2017 Magento 1 store. The trick is keeping it read-only, off the checkout path, and out of the order tables. AI Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:33:03 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/xdebug-3-ssh-tunnel-sftp/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/xdebug-3-ssh-tunnel-sftp/ A working Xdebug 3 setup against a remote SFTP-only host, with the tunnel direction, path map and idekey gotchas spelled out so you don't lose an afternoon. PHP Thu, 11 Jun 2026 05:41:34 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/curl-recon-legacy-hardening/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/curl-recon-legacy-hardening/ An agency drops a URL into the brief at 23:41 and asks for a hardening quote by morning. Seven curl one-liners take five minutes and size the work honestly. Security Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:51:26 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/joomla-image-library-to-s3/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/joomla-image-library-to-s3/ How we moved a 22GB Joomla 3 image library to S3 over one weekend, without breaking a single article reference or noticing a flicker in the access log. Migration Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:58:08 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/wordpress-functions-php-hack-cleanup/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/wordpress-functions-php-hack-cleanup/ A hacked theme functions.php is rarely alone. Here is the four-pass cleanup we run on WordPress sites before anyone goes near wp-options or wp-posts. WordPress Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:03:44 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/reading-mysqlbinlog-row-events/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/reading-mysqlbinlog-row-events/ An agency lead pings at 23:41: someone swapped wp_options.siteurl, the web logs are clean. Here is how to read mysqlbinlog row events and find them. Databases Thu, 11 Jun 2026 02:12:44 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/drupal-9-session-table-outage/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/drupal-9-session-table-outage/ A Drupal 9 site started 502ing only for logged-in editors on a Thursday afternoon. Anonymous traffic was fine. The cause was a sessions table that had outgrown ibdata1. Drupal Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:20:50 GMT Pier editorial https://pier.abn.company/blog/tls-handover-checklist/ https://pier.abn.company/blog/tls-handover-checklist/ A one-page TLS handover checklist for inherited sites. The leaf, the chain, the cron and the four hidden traps hosts forget to mention at handover. Security Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:28:09 GMT Pier editorial