Process of elimination

Ever find yourself up against a weird problem in CiviCRM (or WordPress, or Drupal, or any other system you rely on)?

Usually in a complex system, the your stubborn weird problem could be caused by any number of things:

Permissions problems, conflicts with your CMS theme, plugins, extensions, etc., etc.

How can you even know where to start?

The smart answer is:

Start anywhere you like, but find a way to try one thing at a time.

For example, maybe you think your weird problem with custom fields might be caused by one of your extensions:

• Try disabling all of the extensions, and see if the problem goes away.

• If it doesn't, you can stop wondering about your extensions. Re-enable all of them and check something else.

• But if it does, re-enable one or a few of them at a time, until you find the one that's causing the problem.

Or, do you think it's caused by something in the configuration of your contribution page?

• Try creating a new contribution page with the most basic of configurations possible, and see if that page has the problem too.

• If not, change one or two configurations to match that of your original contribution page. Does your new page now have this problem?

• Keep editing the configuration to be more and more like your problem page, testing as you go to see if the new page has the problem.

• If the problem never shows up on your new contribution page, you can be sure it's not the page configuration, and move on to checking something else.

Here's the thing:

If you've got a specialist who can look at it for you, you might save yourself a lot of trial and error. The advice of an experienced specialist can go a long way.

But when you don't have someone you can ask, a careful process of elimination is a whole lot better than just remaining mystified.

And the truth is, this kind of elimination process is what a good specialist will do anyway. They'll just do it a lot faster.

All the best,
A.