Feargal O Kane's blog

Command Line basics

Server Structure

Snippet for embedding a view directly into a tpl.php file

Our backup and maintenance strategy is based around the five basic parts of Drupal:

1. The core drupal codebase
2. The database
3. Contributed modules
4. Contributed themes
5. Files directory

Our site architecture means that 3,4 and 5 are all within the sites directory but when doing backups it's good to think of them as separate.

Master backup

Make a master backup when:

For the new communityNI we want users to be able to register their interest on events - whether this leads onto online registration is a different matter - but at the very least we wanted a way for users to show that they were interested in attending a topic.

The easiest way to do this is using the Flag module (http://drupal.org/project/flag). It offers an easy way for users to select whether or not they are going to an event.

These are the instructions from Drupal.org (http://drupal.org/upgrade/downloading-drupal-command-line)

Before doing this make sure to:

1. Go into maintenance mode
2. Turn to a default theme (Garland)
3. Turn off all contributed modules

Carrying out the tasks

Archive the old files
You'll want to move all the old core files into an archived folder for safekeeping using

It had been a while since running into any real issues with IE7 or IE8 when developing the new sites. However, the new CommunityNI demo was displaying some content correctly but not the overall theme look and feel.

Using the new developer tools in IE8 I was able to see that IE was only rendering a selected number of stylesheets from modules.

I found this article on drupal.org (http://drupal.org/node/228818) which dealt with the same issue.

We're now lucky enough to have two servers up and running with debian (Sue and Jackson) and so we can switch the development sites over from our long-suffering Ubuntu install.

I'd already set up base installs on Sue, so it was just a case of pulling over th files, modules, themes and fixing any Apache errors.

Preparation on the old sites

To make things run aas smoothly as possible there are a couple of basic steps to follow if you want to avoid white screen of death errors.

Add GD Library

$ sudo apt-get install php5-gd

Then restart Apache:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Hide Apache Info

However, we're not done yet. We don't want Apache or PHP to disclose any information about themselves, as this information is not needed by your users and could pose a security risk. First, back up the original Apache configuration file:

sudo cp /etc/apache2/apache2.conf /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.bak

Now open the configuration file:

We needed to get navicat connected to Sue so that we can easily transfer databases.

Trying a simple new connection didn't work as it said that the CRM4 box wasn't allowed to connect to Sue.

After adding the user to MySQL tried the following code:

GRANT ALL ON *.* TO YourUserName@"%"
(for ALL hosts)

Same as adding the user through phpMyAdmin interface with all privileges on all databases.

The XPS machine was a totally clean rebuild of windows to get it up and running ann suited for what we need I had to: