Our organization has bought a template that we like, and experimented with it, but now that we are ready to install it over our existing site, we find that much, if not most, of the design elements are embodied in the "sample data". The catch is that installing the sample data involves using "snapshot" and "demonstration site" module, and this would delete all existing content on our site - not good! It uses views, panels, chaos tools, flex slider, etc.
The sample data contains a whole lot of design (e.g. 64 blocks in the new template, many views, many panels, sliders, etc.). When I install the theme and the additional modules on our site, I find I still have many hours of work to do to define all the views, slideshows, etc. that I would have expected to "just show up" when I installed the new theme
and activated it. After beating my head against this for a day or so, I now realize that what the developer didn't give me was a database update script that would add these objects to the database for me. Does anyone have an idea how I can proceed? I know I can just go and repeat all the design details that are "in there" in the demo site, but I'm finding that I don't even know what all I need to add. I've jumped into phpMyAdmin and looked at the tables in the demo site and at least there I can see what db items I might need to add, but it's a long process.
Are there some clever things I can do to find the "difference" between two databases? I would install the new theme to a brand new site, without sample data. I would then add the sample data, I would do a database-delta, and then those changes could be applied to my operational site.
Yes I know I'm dreaming, but possibly there's some way out of this short of repeating all the work?
Comments
programming skills?
How good are the programming skills in your organization?
I actually think a theme that wants to delete / overwrite content is ridiculous, but is there someone who could write a .csv import script? There are some modules that do this, but none are that great. - It would not be that hard.
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The main man of Set Sail's Daycare Management Software :)
Semi-Manual Process
Agree overwriting is ridiculous - these guys actually tell me "our templates can't be used as skins". Their notion is that you take the demo install and then begin to replace content - starting with the slides in a slideshow, moving onto the projects in a list of projects that your organization has accomplished, etc. It works fine that way, but jeez, they really don't have a clue about separation of theme design from content, and the whole notion of replaceable look and feel.
So I've gone ahead and done it the hard way, and am getting there. I'm working on two sites side by side on two computers - one is the standard demo site with content, the other is my current site with our content - I have merged all extra stuff from sites/all and sites/default (modules we didn't have, libraries we didn't have, files we didn't have, etc.) and am now going through all the modules and activating the correct ones, then will re-implement a bunch of views, then a bunch of panels, etc. and then will allocate to regions. About the only thing I'm getting out of this is that their design sense was good (better than mine) and they have particular ways to accomplish things that their example site teaches me. When I get through, I'll understand the implementation much better than otherwise.
Rick Cunningham
fun Saturday
fun Saturday night for you Rick :)
Good luck. I do agree that wading that deep through someone else's work lets you learn a lot. What a pain though.
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The main man of Set Sail's Daycare Management Software :)
Using Features Module to export Views, etc.
While doing some late reading last night, I discovered the existence of a module called Features that in a nutshell, lets you export all the bits and pieces important to a particular feature.
Example, I have a theme that has a slideshow that uses the flex slider module, which uses the views module to get some javascript, then is dependent on you defining a particular content type (one of the slides) and formatting the resultant block in a special way. The content type, the block, all their settings, etc. would wind up in the database, and couldn't be exported by themselves. Making a feature of this thing, and including the module, any module dependencies (the features module figures that out), the content type, the special view, and the block settings gives me something that acts like a new module - I can export it, then upload and import to the new site.
I'll report on my progress if anyone's interested.
Rick Cunningham