Steven Zahm@ Craig
RE: Back on 3/30 I commented on a ticket titled Parse error crashes entire site after upgrade to 8.16 #post-460175 and there was zero response.
My sincerest apologies! I never saw the other thread until you posted this today. I had to look it up thru your post history in order to see it.
If you ever run into such an error again and do not hear from me within 24hrs, at the absolute longest, please use the Contact link at the very bottom of this page. I deal with all issues very quickly and issues like this one are corrected the same day. And this one was.
RE: I then went back on 4/6 and found that Steve Zahm replied to a different ticket with a fix, but when I did it, it wiped out all custom css/layout work we had done.
Sounds like you may have altered the core plugin files. I am sorry for that loss! Regardless of the error you encountered you would have lost this work when updating Connections.
This is not a bug or limitation in Connections. The same would result if you edit any plugins files. Those change would be lost when the plugin is updated. In fact the same is true with WordPress too. If you edit its files, those changes would also be lost on an update.
The reason is on updates WordPress basically just deletes the contents of a plugin’s folder and then copies in the new version’s files.
Depending on the changes you are making I do provide methods to make update safe changes. If you can let me know the changes you’ve made, I can provide some guidance on how to make them update safe (if possible).
IMPORTANT :: Please read this.
I took a look at your site http://www.rairc.com/ and found the pages where you are using Connections.
Load the Staff page in Chrome, hit the F12 key and then click the Console tab.
Chrome is letting you know that is blocking several files due to mixed content. You are trying to load some files over http instead of https so Chrome is blocking them from loading.
You should correct this so those missing files can be loaded.
You can force Chrome to load these files by click the little shield icon to the far right of the URL in the address bar. After you force Chrome to allow mixed content your directory entries display correctly (I assume).
So, one of those blocked files actually seem to contain your custom CSS for Connections and is not related to the error you experienced or the Connections updates.
I hope this helps! Please let me know that you’ve received this.