I received this email from my host yesterday, explaining why the site went down for a better portion of the day.

At 7:40am this morning, one of our air conditioning units failed in the cage at the One Wilshire building, the building’s maintenance department dispatched an engineer to attend to their unit, which is now fully operational. Unfortunately as a result of this, some of our servers in the One Wilshire building were in danger of overheating and were shut down as a precautionary measure. All servers are either up or in the process of being up at this moment.

We greatly apologize for the inconvenience caused to any of our customers who have accounts on the Los Angeles datacenter servers, one of 4 datacenters we use for hosting.

I also received an email informing me that I had a ‘vulnerable’ version of Wordpress installed. Nothing new, it needed updating so today I have updated the CMS software to the latest available version.

As expected…something broke Wordpress has ditched the older ‘wp_categories’ table and has now gone for a taxonomy system involving a tag+name id system.

The php used to implement the post counts per category in the header menu had to be modified and now does this:

$numPostsCat = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->term_relationships where term_taxonomy_id = $catID");

rather than this:

$numPosts = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish'");

This also meant that the function had to be called not using the actual category id’s (term_id) but rather the assigned term_taxonomy_id.

It sounds more complicated than it really is, but at least I was able to sort it out.