Site upgrades this week

This week I have updated the site to Drupal 5.7 and Gallery2 2.2.4 (from Drupal 5.2 and G2 2.2.3). Before updating the software, I organized the photography section and moved older podcasts off the main page (unchecked the "promote to front page" box in their posts) so that they are accessible from the Audio Gallery but there aren't additional navigation buttons at the bottom of the main page. I also used the Book module to make quick links to the services, and changed the titles of the services that were archived so that they start with the date in order to have them auto-sort chronologically. I then backed up the entire website in that state on April 6th, the backup is stored on the server in a section not accessible from the web, in a subfolder of the docroot, and I've downloaded that file as well as the MySQL databases to my own harddrive. The backup does not contain the audio files or photographs to reduce the archive's filesize. I am creating a backup of the posted audio files today and it will be saved in the same docroot backups folder. I will also be taking the site offline for a short period of time to make a backup of the currently updated state before messing with anything else and potentially breaking it. I am planning to set the off-line message to have a link to this blog when I do this, so that people can find out why the site is off-line and estimate when it will be back, for those who are interested. I have made a practice of posting the date and time that the site was set to off-line mode, though when I restore from a backup that gets changed automatically so it is not always accurate.


I am trying to get a rich text editor installed as well as a user-friendly way to add images from the photo gallery to posts, in order to facilitate having additional volunteers helping with getting the podcasts up without having them need to know how to write HTML in order to insert pictures or make text bold/italics/underline/etc. This process has caused a few
error codes to be generated, so I'm proceeding with caution and want to test them out on the test site more before proceeding and potentially winding up having to restore the regular site from backup yet again.

First post

Since what's going on behind the scenes on the website hasn't been being documented in a very accessible-to-teamwork way, this blog is being started to hopefully rectify that.

If you're either already working on the website or would like to help with it, please comment on this post and request to be invited to be an author on this blog so that you can note changes that you make to the site here (which also helps in case someone breaks something, knowing what was done and when speeds up fixing it, or at least lets us know which is the most recent fully functional backup).