UPDATE FEB 10: Thanks to the incredible offers of support – we have resolved all the issues below and are in the process of applying them to the website.

2021 marks five years from our last big evolution, where we rolled out a long-needed upgrade to our news and daily reporting blog — and this month, we’re reaching out to you, our loyal readers, to ask for your help with some of the less-frequently-managed fan resources that our site is known for.

While the news section of our site that you’re reading right now will be fine, the more ‘static’ portions of TrekCore, including the heavily-visited image and screencap galleries that most of you use on a regular basis are going to be primarily impacted by this change.

To take you behind the curtain a bit, this week we learned that our site’s web host will be upgrading TrekCore’s servers to run PHP 7.4 (and will no longer support older versions), which puts us in a bit of a tough spot, as much of our existing site structure is built upon older versions of PHP code.

While it’s served us very well for years, early testing with PHP 7.4 has brought us some less-than-optimal results, due to some legacy coding which we’re no longer able to maintain.

TrekCore had a few talented contributors who helped create our current structure several years ago, but our current site management team doesn’t have the needed PHP skillset to address today’s challenges — which is why we’re reaching out to our amazing community to ask for any assistance in resolving our two biggest issues this PHP 7.4 upgrade will cause.

The most critical fix we need to resolve is a compatibility issue with our custom-built news headline system, which populates both the TrekCore.com homepage as well as the Trek series subsections throughout our site; this simply ceases to work with PHP 7.4 implemented.

We don’t anticipate this to be a very time-intensive fix — hopefully, at least! — and we’re not looking to have the entire system redesigned or rebuilt. At this time, we’re simply asking for assistance in pinpointing the compatibility problem(s), and some help in correcting the issue.

This is the most time-sensitive  programming correction we need to resolve.

Our secondary objective — less urgent, but more impactful for most visitors to the “other half” of TrekCore — relates to our large collection of image galleries, which currently run on the open-source Coppermine photo gallery system.

While we’ve been able to successfully test PHP 7.4 on these portions of our site, successfully carrying over the design and structure of the galleries, the new PHP 7.4 implementation eliminates a custom modification currently in place which we would greatly prefer to remain available to us.

Currently, when you’re visiting one of our galleries, clicking/tapping on an image thumbnail will bring you directly to the full-size version to which it was linked; you also have the ability to right-click/long-press on the thumbnail to open the linked, full-size image in a new tab or window.

Once PHP 7.4 is in place — see this test-upgraded gallery for an example — the Coppermine system no longer retains that convenient browsing option, and forces all thumbnail links to open their related full-size image in a new pop-up window (which immediately closes if clicked/tapped).

This is not only inconvenient for fans browsing our galleries, but with the volume of daily visitors who access our image galleries (a number much higher than you may assume!), the repeated, extra uses of the “displayimage” PHP script involved in this pop-up action will severely impact our server load in a way that will critically impact the stability of our site.

In the past, a volunteer was able to modify two files which made it possible to allow our galleries to bypass this image pop-up functionality, and we have those modifications on file to allow the ‘old’ and ‘new’ versions of the Coppermine implementation to be compared — hopefully, someone with a better working knowledge of PHP scripting will see a ‘quick fix’ to reapply the existing modification.

There is also an existing Coppermine plug-in tool that we are exploring as a secondary option — and honestly this is our preferred path — but it doesn’t quite have the functionality we need. If our ‘bypass’ modification is not something will be an easy implementation to restore our current functionality, perhaps a talented reader may be able to assist in modifying the plugin we’re looking at to work how we need.

UPDATE FEB 10: Thanks to the incredible offers of support – we have resolved all the issues above and are in the process of applying them to the website.