site upgrades and downtime
I've been meaning to get around to upgrading this site for a long time. In fact next month will mark three years since I set up this site and there have been a LOT of updates to the code that powers it which have not been applied. The site is two releases behind the current Drupal release, and while we have managed to secure it pretty well by restricting access so heavily, its definitely time to think about upgrading.
Upgrading will mean downtime for the site, and lots of work for me. The best time for me to attempt to upgrade will be over the holidays when I will have some spare time. I don't know how long it will take or how successful I will be in porting everything. I will make sure I have full backups in case anything goes terribly wrong.
Over time I tweaked a lot of code and added some optional modules for more functionality until tdbcelts became fairly complex. One thing I will probably remove is the audio modules which allow you to play various mp3s that have been uploaded over time. This was pretty much a silent feature anyway, takes up a lot of space and uses bandwidth and I've been using other sites to host audio recently anyway.
There are some things I have always wanted to improve, mainly the profile section. I've always wanted to add little icons under the profile image for current (and past?) Clann position for instance and couldn't figure out an elegant way to do that with this old code.
In any case, this thread is open for all discussion and ideas for improving the site before the holidays hit. I can't say for sure I'll even have the time to do it then - but I need to start work on it so this site doesn't end up getting hacked or spammed.
Sounds good to me. Good
Sounds good to me. Good time for it, too.
Sounds good!
Upgrade away!
Site update
Like the new look Comyn! Nice job!
thanks!
Thanks Faellon, but it's actually just a default template - most of the work was "under the hood" and won't make much difference to anyone. There are a couple new things though - like if you click on someone's profile you can then click on the "track" tab to list all their posts. I'm sure I'll find some more goodies as we go forward, but the real reason for the upgrade was the code was getting so old I was afraid the site would be hacked.
upgrade log
I started working on the upgrade at about 2:30pm and we're back online now at 9:30pm. I began by taking a full backup of the site (via rsync) to my local machine, then backing up the database (its in mysql). I thought (briefly) about performing the whole upgrade locally as a test, but realized it was going to take far too long, so decided to forge ahead. Since the site was running on *very* old code (Drupal 4.7) and there have been two major updates since that came out, I had to upgrade to 5.21 first, then upgrade again to 6.15. Upgrading consists of turning off all the modules, then wiping out everything, installing all the new release files, then running an update script against the database. Luckily, this went pretty smoothly both times.
Then the PAIN of finding updated modules for all the plugin stuff I had running, installing each of those, and updating the database for each one. Things like images and image galleries, user profiles, events and calendars, forums, access security (for maps to folks houses and events and minutes when they first go up), [and subscriptions! forgot about that] these are all modules that extend the core functionality of Drupal, and had to be dealt with separately. We have a massive amount of stuff up on the site, so it took a long time to verify everything was working again.
Had one major issue with themes not working as expected, ended up wiping out all the default themes, loading the site with no theme, then putting back a fresh copy from the latest tar file, then re-selecting the default theme (bluemarine) and suddenly it worked again.
I've already noticed that some things have changed like the order of comments and such which I will try to put back as we had it, and some things are gone (all audio has been removed). As far as the theme goes (the "look and feel" of the site), turns out I can't use the theme from 4.7 so if I wanted to do that same thing again, I'd have to completely redesign it anyway. I decided to just use a default theme for now and put the library links on the right. I see this as temporary since we do probably want to have the site reflect the hobby a bit more, but not sure how much more time I can devote to the site this week. Any ideas for a new theme are welcome. Oh, and anyone who wants to actually design the them is encouraged to do so!
Site Upgrades
It looks good; the only thing I would change is to change the white background to something like yellow. The white is hard on my old eyes. :)
No yellow please!
That would be harder on the eyes than white!
theme update
I couldn't just use the old theme because it wasn't compatible with the new engine, and the old theme was based on tables (not good practice) so I dug in this morning to port the old theme to Drupal 6. Its not what I wanted (I was working on a cool ogham stone theme) but that was going to take forever to finish. As it is this port took me most of the morning and into the afternoon!
I've left the bluemarine theme enabled, so if you'd rather switch to that, select 'My account' and click the 'edit' tab, then select the bluemarine theme instead.
Re: No Yellow Please!
You are right, Faellon, what I really meant was the old background color (parchment?), which Comyn has now put back.
theme raid
When I first set up the site I looked at a lot of SCA sites for something I liked and found Mountain Freehold (in northern Vermont). As it turned out it wasn't difficult to modify their images for Drupal, so I stole them! I never told anyone at Mountain Freehold about it, so I feel a bit guilty since a Celt should go on raids with pride and at the least let the vanquished know they were bested. Trouble is, they still have all their images and don't even know I have them as well! Surely there is some magic involved here for me to obviously have stolen what is theirs and yet, for them to still have it. I must consult the druids about this...