[haiku-web] Grab your planners: Drupal 5 deployment

Hello guys,

I am hoping to start the migration to Drupal 5.15 soon. After several
test migrations, I can conclude that the migration does not lead to
important data loss. There are still some kinks in the cable, but my
opinion is that it is preferable to work these out when the new
website is deployed. With software as complex as Drupal, it is
impossible to completely plan ahead.

Now I will outline the plan below, but beforehand I would like to set
the date. My hands are itching, and I would like to start as soon as
next week Saturday (which is the 28th of February). Because I would
like to work as a team, I propose starting at 16:00 GMT, which will
translate to 17:00 for us in Western Europe, and 08:00 AM for the
Californian crew. See below for the plan.

PLAN
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The plan is to migrate to Drupal 5.15 with all our modules. The
upgrade can be distinguished in three phases:

1. Low level work. This is the part where we create a new database,
upload the data, prepare the website for upgrade and install the new
software. I will do this part, I've done it before. This takes max 30
minutes depending on the server load.

2. Software work. The new Drupal needs to update the database. Also,
the custom modules need to be enabled. I found that it is better to
enable these one by one, than to do this all at once. Because each
module has some sort of database upgrade, this is scheduled to take
about an hour. During this phase, we can also start reconfiguring the
modules as they come up.

3. Plumbing. This is the phase where I hope a group of people will
help in comparing the old installation of the website with the new,
and start fixing the issues we come across. I expect that blocks
(those yellow thingies in the side-bars) need to be fixed, as well as
some content templates.

Now ideally, at some point on Saturday we have a website that
basically functions and that can go live with a disclaimer. In a worse
case, the plumbing session on Sunday will be required to make it work
reasonably. Note that 'reasonable' in this case is decided by the
admins that are on call Saturday and Sunday.

CALL FOR HELP
------
Now here is the call for help. First and foremost I am looking for a
few people that know our website (and perhaps are admins already),
that can help with the actual plumbing. I'll be there, and I hope at
least two people can join me.

Furthermore, I will make a call for help for people to browse through
the websites and compare the old one with the new one, and point out
the work to the admins on an IRC channel. This task does not require
much technical knowledge, and can be described as a nice community
task.

Finally, I'm looking for some help in designing a simple but good
looking page that tells people going to the Haiku website that the
page is under maintenance. This is not a complex task, but I'm not a
designer nor a HTML+CSS wizard (though I try sometimes), and I would
like some help. Takes about an hour of work.


So that's about the plan. Any comments? Volunteers?

Let me know,

Kind regards,

N.
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