BobbyMods

BM Project Ultra LightAfter searching for a simple project manager I just decided a while ago to make one based solely on drupal core to avoid any upgrade issues. The whole thing came out rather well, so now I'll alpha test it with my own projects to ready the beta version.

In an earlier post I mentioned a move of a web site to a different web host Moving a web site to another host.
Today after monitoring for a couple of days I can say the transmission went 'mostly' according to plan.
The checklist was very helpful but there were still a couple of things that had to be fine tuned;

Footers

Drupal has a nice feature to input a site wide footer message from the administration panel, it can be found at Administer>>Site configuration>>Site informationn  scroll down to Footer message:.

The only thing with this is that it is text only, and what you typically want is to be able to add some dynamic content in there.

One of the first thing you would want to do is to add a copyright notice to your site. Now, there is a module for nearly everything, and so there is this gem appropriately called  'Copyright'  which can set the copyright for the entire site and for individual  content pages.

There is a simpler way that, although manual, will help keep your install "light".

What I do is to just create a block, set the input format to "PHP code" and enter the following code:

After that you can further customize when and where it will appear, if you need special formatting you can add css classes to it and enhance it's display as needed.

Another task of web maintenance is moving a site from one web host to another.
Today I've got a site that has to be moved from its current web host.
 
The main body of this site is HTML with three php powered subsystems;

1. a search function based on phpdig
2. a custom coded survey php script
3. a modified webdirectory php script
4. an ad serving package phpads

 
Now this sounds like a web maintenance task that is not too difficult.
As always the killer is in the details.

In 2004 I developed an affiliate web site in dreamweaver and I have done some minor maintenance on it since then.
Now the owner wants to be able to edit everything from his favorite coffeshop.
Anyway this is a great candidate for a straight migration from html to drupal.
He doesn't want to change the design of the website, actually a change is ok "as long as it is a bonus" but he really needs the ability to edit and configure, so this should be fun.
Main points are;

Ok, I had my web development site running on an older version of drupal with a nice collection of modules.
Well, the newer core versions came and the non-core module updates didn't! (not in time for me anyway)
 
No Problem, except for two things;

1. I didn't have time to upgrade non core modules.
2. It was time to rethink and redo the old site anyway.

A new start can be a good thing and is in line with the drupal "no backwards code compatibility" guideline.