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By blueblade on
Hi,
I am using Drupal 6.15 and finally got the site working somehow...but there are still some modules that are not stable or are still causing some major problems...should I lauch my first Drupal site anyway? or should I wait? I am a little worried about the maintenance after launching the site because it has not been easy getting the site going even without any users...
Comments
It's hard to answer since we
It's hard to answer since we don't know what problems you have. Still, I recommend that you collect a list of your problems and decide what's a "blocking" one (I mean, you don't want to launch your site without solving that) and what's in the "not-so-important" category which can be fixed later.
The ideal thing would be, however that you eliminate all of your problems.
Launch it now
I never believe there is a perfect time to launch, plus in reality it will take a while for google to pick up your site anyway, so do it now and continue to work on it while its live.
Impediments to funtionality
Impediments to funtionality should probably be looked at. Otherwise throw it out there. Little niggly things are easy enough to fix as you go usually.
And unless they're in alpha or something like that I usually find most -dev and even -beta modules relatively stable, I had a couple of sites running with -dev modules with no dramas, and one of them was using a -beta module with no trouble that I could detect, so don't let that be too much of a cause for concern.
works at bekandloz | plays at technonaturalist
Thank you
I must first make clear that Drupal is AMAZING!!
Right now my site is almost complete but few key modules are not and those modules are not from Drupal core. Those modules are very important to my site but have not been stable. My site even gone blank several times installing/uninstalling some of them, although I was able to get the site back everytime but still that makes me worry, what if the site is broken and, for whatever reason, the latest backup I have is from 2 weeks ago? I expect the users to contribute content on my site and something like that could really cause some serious complaints.
Can you please share with me your experience on how you maintain your live sites? Any suggestion will be helpful since I have never ran a live Drupal site myself. Many thanks.
BB
your site probably went blank because...
your php memory limit is too low when adding more modules! try increasing it to 256m (read up about WSOD aka White screen of death) on the drupal website..
Your hosting provider should
Your hosting provider should be doing backups at least every 48hrs, though the ones I'm familiar with back up every 24hrs. What do you want to know?
For the other person, theming isn't hard, Firebug is your friend ;)
works at bekandloz | plays at technonaturalist
Unfortunately
I cant 100% trust the hosting provider. I am currently backing up my files several times a day. Also, theming is difficult but it also is something under my control, I just have to do it. I am more concern about the modules as I am not a programmer myself. How do you guys keep up with all the updates and changes with the modules? I understand that we will have to deal with this no matter which open source or even paid cms we use and Drupal modules are very good and most of them stable, but, how are you guys keeping up with the modules? what do you do when you have users and all in a sudden one or more of the key modules you're using is not supported any more, going through major changes or whatever else that will affect your site in some big ways?
When you have reached a
When you have reached a stable site you should stick to it. After you open it to the public and users visit it, it becomes a Production Site.
Production Sites aren't meant to be changed often. Instead, you must have a copy of your site *and* database in order to test modules' new versions or new functionalities you may want to add. That would be your Testing Site.
After you have tried new versions/functionalities and you are ready to apply them on the Production Site, you may put you site off-line (admin/settings/site-maintenance) if you believe it's necessary or some update requires it.
Regarding backups, I'm using Backup and Migrate module to hourly backup my main database and I manually download all the files in the site three times a week. I can't trust my hosting provider either.
Hope my experience with Drupal helps you. Have fun!
Sounds like you need to find
Sounds like you need to find someone you trust then o_O So far, I'm happy enough with mine that they can reliably back up the daily doings and I take a db dump before upgraders.
Do all tests on a local development and once it's working to your satisfaction, upgrade the production site. If you haven't launched the production site yet, take your time. There's an update module in drupal core that y ou can turn on, every time cron runs it checks to see if drupal or any of the modules requires updating and if it does, it lets you know. Makes it much easier to keep up with the modules :)
As for major changes, well, I've had that happen with one of my sites. It has a fan art gallery where people post artwork, and in D5 I was using the Image module. It looks like Image is going to be deprecated (there is a D6 version but it might not make it into D7), so I switched to using CCK and all its bits and bobs. Unfortunately due to the way I'd constructed the art gallery to begin with I'm currently in the process of manually copying all the information in the old Image nodes to the new CCK nodes (my db scripts mangled so much that it was just as time consuming to do it by hand as to run a script and then go back and fix things). I think I'm down to about 5-600 nodes left to do now. And that's how things roll sometimes, just gotta deal with it :)
(and I hope that nothing ever changes that drastically ever again as there are continually fan art nodes getting added! XD)
works at bekandloz | plays at technonaturalist
That's crazy...
Hi ryivhnn,
Another 500-600 nodes to go by hand? are you sure there's no better way to do that? ....oh no...at least you make it sound like fun. I hope that will never happen to my site...
BB
I'd say there would be but
I'd say there would be but trying to work it out was doing my head in (and blowing up my databases, I'm not so good working direct with them :)).
I'm perusing artwork, while some of it makes me wince, I get to see a lot of good stuff that I haven't seen for a while as the other problem I had with my D5 site was that I successfuly broke the pager so it wouldn't go back more than 20 pages, at the time there were 800 odd works on the site, and about 15 items per page, so the really old ones were "lost" as far as the normal users were concerned (they were there and fine, just inaccessible by normal logical means), so it's not a completely unpleasant job :)
And seeing as I'm not getting paid nearly enough (ie not getting paid at all) to be in any particular hurry with this site I feel quite justified in "converting" as many as I feel like converting when I feel like it, which usually ends up being maybe 2-3 a week.
works at bekandloz | plays at technonaturalist