So, after three weeks of manically scrambling to create pages and pour in content, the new Assumption website is finally up. The countdown to being added was preceeded by a ~36 hour workday, going from Tuesday at 8:45am, through Tuesday night, to Wednesday at about 7pm, exhausted. Within that time, I did take about an hour and a half to nap and shower at home, and went out to the Chophouse for my sister’s birthday Tuesday night — it was the first steak that I had since before Lent, so I revelled in the opportunity to get some meat now that Easter had passed. So, Ben switched over the servers Wednesday afternoon and we got the site up and going.
There was a slight snafu with the new server being firewalled and no student access for a few minutes, but that was resolved quickly. And then, of course, the real fun started. First, we had to switch servers and there’s a reason for this:
- Datatel’s software only runs on Windows using IIS (server software). We’ve long had Mac web servers running Apache.
- Our old web server is full of 10+ years of JUNK, straight junk, having served the particularly odd web and directory practices of a good 4 or 5 web developers — all who have their own peculiar way of doing things (myself CERTAINLY included. I am sure, one day, somebody will look at the old websites and say “Why the hell is the CSS folder called “c” and the images folder called “i.” Well, that’s one of my nuances… you can spot a Mike Murray site if commonly hit or linked to development directories are named with one letter).
- We’ve been running risks only having one server, we need another one to pass off to just incase.
- We should split up the load, /users/ sites should be on their own box, not the campus’ web server.
- It’s time for change
Of course, this produced more headaches than anybody could account for. I had a three-week window, from March 22nd until April 15 to get the site up and running. This may even be less than three weeks but my brain is so melted that I’m not willing to count it out. It wasn’t possible to get the number of sites up that we did get up in that window, especially considering that almost all of the web pages in the new system have new copy written for them. Plus, you can’t do a “copy and paste” job with Datatel’s CMS. Perhaps I shouldn’t reveal this great secret, for fear of being assassinated by the CMS czar’s who put it together, but copying and pasting does not work, I did most of the sites by straight HTML. It would have been faster to do it in notepad, and that is not hyperbole — notepad doesn’t crash or get locked up or require you to jump through hoops to change the name of a file. Further, if you make the page slightly wrong in notepad, it doesn’t break out and re-write your code for you, the “Rich Text Editor” does.
Needless to say, not every site could be added to the new layout, and we knew this going in, but were confirmed of this just before Easter… when I was frantically working to get the main pages looking how they should. On top of that, the amount of content that is on these pages behind the scenes is remarkably extensive. You only see one profile on a screen at once, or perhaps one event, or one news story, but dozens and dozens were put in. Only one photo from a photo gallery is on the page, but there’s 10 others behind that, and they all have to be uploaded and listed in the CMS separately, and then manually tied into the photo gallery content type. It’s not a quick fix. Often times, making a “simple change” requires ditching something completely and starting over on it.
Not that I’m complaining, or anything.
The best solution was to make the face pages and then — because we were switching to a new server — change the links to the previous pages to a short and easy to remember alias prefix. This was “WWW1,” which I am sure that every content manager at Assumption now despises, but it’s short, easy to remember, and easy to fix on sites… rather than “archive” or “old” or anything else. THis would also allow for most links to keep working… if we changed anything else or put them in another directory, it would kill every page. Most of these continue to work, and only handfuls are broken (handfuls in the big picture. 80% of links work, about 20% don’t. These 20% stand out, but it’s still not terrible).
I had more to share with this but the site has sapped all of my energy, plus I’ve been here for 12 hours and I’m burned out.
Posted by christophernaples 
