Migrate, MultiSite and Restyle

Done

Some of my lower traffic sites were still on an old Drupal 5, others were at 6.4 and lots of modules were outdated. So I set out to migrate all the sites to a multisite setup. I now have a set of shared modules , shared themes and some specific ones .. just as it is meant to be. And I only have 1 central Drupal instance to upgrade. Next step is figuring out how to trigger the database upgrades from 1 central place.

Well 2 , ny personal stuff and our corporate sites, that's the idea. Personal site is on plain old Drupal 6.6 and for the corporate one we are thinking to go with Acquia Drupal, but we're not sure yet

I've added a new theme, however I can imagine most of you never saw the old one as most of you read this feed in an RSS readers, yet some people nagged me about my lack of style, and as over a decade ago I even won web design contests , something had to be done :)

I moved some blocks left and right and the performance of the site has improved drastically now, mainly slow technorati loading widgets in the left column often blocked loading, that's all gone now.

Also , as some of the commenters on earlier posts complained the main page has no CSS as it isn't in the CMS. So my next step is trying to find out a way that I can replace the now manually maintained files build from different includes into a more dynamical setup where I can also have feeds for my Publications and Presentations.

I`m wondering if there is any microformat or so out there for Presentations and Publications that I could use so other people could use that information in other sites.

After that there's just one site left to migrate.. but that migration won't be for next month as there is some custom modules involved that need to be ported.

Well.. off to some more content then :)

Comments

Wordpress Themes's picture

#1 Wordpress Themes : Moniker DNS

I have been having a TON of problems recently with Moniker and binding domains using their custom NS record set up.

Have you heard if anyone else is having the same problem?

I email their support, and I get back the standard "everything is working fine" spill.

Go figure!

Great Pots,

Cheers,
Michael


Jerry's picture

#2 Jerry : MultiSite management is

MultiSite management is something that I've honestly not considered up until this point. I've been debating the differences between moving to a new CMS, either WP or Drupal. If you are familiar with WP maybe you can answer this question, does Drupal offer 'plugins/modules' that are created strictly for multisites that make management easier?


Red's picture

#3 Red : If you are looking for easier

If you are looking for easier management I would recommend going with Wordpress MU. If you are looking for more functionality and the ability to customize more then I would go with Drupal.


Erin's picture

#4 Erin : I'm curious as to whether or

I'm curious as to whether or not you've written a guide like Gerard asked. That's exactly what I'm looking for as well, I need to have multisite management for my Drupal sites and wasn't really able to find what I was looking for on Drupal.org. Do I need a VPS or Dedicated server to do this? Thanks in advance...


Gerard's picture

#5 Gerard : Kris - I'd love to read how

Kris - I'd love to read how you managed to centralise on to a multisite configuration. I've been considering doing the same with my various Drupal sites just for ease of management.

And who are you hosting with and do they have multisite out of the box?


Kris Buytaert's picture

#6 Kris Buytaert : Aren't there already enough docs ?

Doesn't drupal.org alraedy have a good writeup on how to go multisite if not I'd be glad to document my steps in a separated blog post but it once you think about it , it is dead simple I wonder why I never did it before.

As for hosting we have our own box in a colo. So I pretty much have no limitations.


greggles's picture

#7 greggles : presentation styles

There is the s5 presentation format which even has a Drupal module - http://drupal.org/project/s5


Kris Buytaert's picture

#8 Kris Buytaert : Not really

I`m not really looking for a method to put presentations online.
I`m more looking for a method to keep a list of presentations I gave , with location, time and a possible pointer to a slideshare presentation.
I guess I could look into CCK & Views for this. But I don't want to reinvent the wheel.