Tag: production

Live Site – DOCResource.org

Well, I think that my site is finally ready for some sort of publication. It doesn’t have all the functionality that I want and it has almost no styling at all. But that’s fine; it is a work in progress. And as I add CSS and theme elements, I’ll post how I achieved the results.

If you care to take a look I invite you to. And let me know what you think. DOCResource.org is the name of the site.

I’ve been involved in prison ministry for some time now and got the idea for the site from my experience in dealing with men involved in the criminal justice system and Departments of Correction (DOC) of various states in the USA. The situations that these men and women find themselves in are exceedingly difficult and their families are often ill equipped to deal with the complicated proceedings of the American justice system.  There are few free resources out there and information is usually gained through word of mouth or overtaxed public defenders. So there is usually precious little on which to make informed decisions. I hope to help address that.

The site is listed as a .org and I do plan on incorporating as a 501(c)(3) if the site proves to fill a need and attract an audience. I have a couple of guys providing a bit of feeder information in the blogs and forums and I want to thank them for helping me out. My desire to help springs from my faith and I pray that others may see that and find a desire in themselves to help those in need.

Sand and Prod Reconcilliation

I am going to start doing a manual audit of my Sand and Prod environments to make sure the code base is the same, installed and enabled modules are consistent and theming is relatively close. Since these environments run on completely different platforms, (Prod on hosted VM in Virginia at the awesome Blackmesh Hosting Company, Sand here in Memphis on VMWare player) I am doing a weekly audit to make sure that the environments mimic each other as closely as possible.

Audit Complete – 132 of 152 modules installed/enabled.

Sites/all/libraries the same

status report shows all systems running properly

Centos-6.3 at same levels.

Upgrade Drupal Core from 7.19 to 7.20

I’ll be upgrading my core Drupal files to the version that was released this week.

Here is the short link to the proc i use to upgrade core files. I have used it several times and it is sound.

Sand first then prod. I’ll post how it goes later today. shouldn’t take too long.

I’m also going to spend some time in Quality Assurance for Sand, Qual and Prod. Making sure that they are reasonably close in the modules (need to be the same on that) installed and the stylings that are running on prod. Housekeeping. Very important.

here is a good linux command that i always forget. to delete a non-empty linux dir type

rm -rf /dirname

from the directory right above the one that you want to remove.

The core upgrade is complete with no errors/issues. The upgrade was performed on Sand first. No issues there. Cron has run and everything is up to date. Looking good.

Production Change Request

Install updates for Organic Groups and SEO Checklist from Drupal.org

patch file ../sites/all/mods../views/modules/aggregator.views.inc with code supplied by Drupal.org from views_aggregator-category-table-498438.patch. see prev post for URL. installed in sand to correct issue with Views.

Production Change Request – Install OS Updates

This is one area of change management that is really backwards. because my hosting company is responsible for updating the OS on my server I don’t get a notification. so, i want to make sand/quality/prod the same so the patches are installed on prod first. but i am still going to follow the BPs and document the change. at least I don’t have to go in front of the Change committee anymore and have them pick it apart. Change Management in the corporate world can be such a pain….

so, here’s the proc:

yum update

confirm the new files

rpm -q centos-release

that last command must be run on sand and prod to ensure that the level is consistent.

Theming, CSS and aesthetic decisions

Today I’m going to begin working (again) with the CSS stuff in my sandbox. My environments are all consistent right now (I spent some time over the weekend making sure enabled/installed modules are mirrored and patch levels are the same). It’s amazing how quickly your environments can cease to mirror each other if you’re aren’t meticulous about it.

My prod site is in an OK shape. But there is a lot of work to be done.

  • AT Subtheme 7.x-3.1 (default theme) – my current prod theme

I have changed my sandbox over to the Omega theme. Did a little tweaking and enabled it on Prod. It’s time to get back into working with the CSS stuff. Omega has a good rep as a responsive theme, meaning it uses media queries to determine screen width. This is how the theme knows whether you are on a mobile device or not.

SEO stuff

Yesterday I installed the SEO checklist from Volacci. I felt a little overwhelmed at first from the sheer number of modules and submodules that are installed. So, I did not install them on Prod even though I submitted a Change Request. Today, I began going through all the different settings that are available in the checklist in my Sand environment. And once i started, I realized that they aren’t too bad. Some of the items (adding verifications from Google and Bing) really can’t be done in a non-prod environment so i’m waiting on those. Installing and configuring Mollom is similar. But the long and short is that I feel like the newly added submods and mods are ok. I will go ahead and install them in prod.

One note, i reviewing some of the mods that I didn’t install in sand (mainly the things with URL redirects and aliases), I have found additional details about these features not playing too nicely with some of the multilingual aspects. And those are more important to me.

this site will not really be in direct competition with anyone so SEO isn’t as important to me as it would be in another industry. In most other cases SEO is crucial. But not here.

Production Change Request – Modules and patch

Install translation_management-7.x-1.0-beta1.tar.gz

installing this module will actually install six modules total. three for Translation Management and three for Translation Services.

This has been tested in Quality and there is a known bug that has been fixed by the installation of the patch detailed in this post. the qual patch was successful.

Resolved – Warning: Parameter 1 to icl_content_node_view

Also, Install upgrade to Organic Groups. install has been installed in quality with no issues.

 Organic groups 7.x-2.0-rc2 7.x-2.0-rc3 (Release notes)