As our sites grow in readership and popularity, we need to keep up with that demand by upgrading our servers when the event calls for it. Over the past two days, we have been in the middle of our latest server expansion, and a couple of things went wrong right near the end.

Our Expression Engine plugins were not compatible with the latest version of PHP, and it resulted in some unsightly errors across the sites that used the affected plugins. Of course, we didn’t understand why the errors were occurring - but Paul Burdick, the CTO of pMachine, asked me for my FTP information and went to town. He changed the coding of the plugins that were giving us strife so that they were compatible with the upgraded version of PHP. Later, he gave me a word of advice when our database was having trouble.

I mean, seriously - how often does the CTO of a company offer their personal assistance to one of their clients? Paul is a busy guy, and I am sure the work he was doing on our end took away from the work he is doing on Expression Engine development.

At Gear Live Media, we love the folks at pMachine, and adore their flagship CMS, Expression Engine.