More Vhost changes

I mentioned before that I was going to rebuild my partner's website in Drupal 6 rather than migrate it from Drupal 4. And that I did. But, as any man can tell you, it is a woman's prerogative to change her mind, and this website rebuild was no exception.

Since Terry retired at the beginning of this month, she decided that she no longer wanted a website directed towards her professional life, and instead, wanted a website that reflected her new life of leasure. So, not only did I have to rebuild the site, I had to retheme it, and alter the features available on it.

We settled on a blog for now, with the capability of adding a photo gallery and some other, personal, features later. The Drupal logo changed from functional to fun, and the front page got a bit of introductory text (replacing the old "site under construction" text).

Terry even cut her first blog entry!

I built the new site on an internal Drupal 6 URL, with a generic "development" Drupal 6 database. I'm still trying to work out a migration/development procedure that I can use on all my sites, and this was the iterative next step. Once we assembled the site to our satisfaction, it came down to the (hopefully short and simple) procedure of moving it into production. This turned out to be a little more cumbersome than I first intended, and my procedure will change because of it.

First, I moved the contents of the "development" database to the new "production" database, configured the Drupal MySQL userid with permissions to access the database, and set up the Drupal 6 file and sites directories. I missed a value in sites/$HERDOMAIN/settings.php that caused me some headaches later, so I've now added an entry in my checklist to cover that change as well.

Next, I edited my httpd-vhosts.conf file to direct the external URL to the new Drupal 6 directories, and restarted Apache. Voila, the new site is live on the Internet!

But, it wasn't stable. Some pages lead to the wrong URLs; the site URL changed according to the page I tried to access. This is where the missing change in settings.php made their effects known. After a few minutes struggling with the URL, I figured out what had happened, and made the appropriate correction to the file. Bingo! The site is stable, and my partner is happy.

Next, I have to migrate my final site from Drupal 4 to Drupal 6. This promises to be a long but straight-forward conversion. Next episode: The Final Migration.