Intro | Site Version History

Overview

Summary

The approaching Drupal v9 upgrade, in theory much easier that all before, was a time to review progress. It has not been good overall in terms of site content. This was largely due o regular softwarwe updates eg closing potential security issues and the inability to make changes on the development site and upload that to the live site. [in Drupal 7 the content edits were applied on the live site]

Some internal htm-php-database sites had been developed - they have been simple to create, update and are working well. In the end this was a chosen option - losing some functions but gaining simplicity and easier routes to update. There is also a proven way to recreate some of the lost tools

New CSS frameworks have also helped as well as several web tools over the last decade eg Leaflet Map API and Mapbox serving OpenStreetMap.

This was the prefrered option going forward.

The hosting plaform since mid 2018 has been with Krystal, who have benn excellent [there is no comparison with 123-Reg and we should have moved sooner].

Overview

Summary

The migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 was a painful experience. This was because Drupal 8 was a different beast from the prevous version. From this point on the software was managed by configuration management packages, principally php-composer

While migration modules were provided there were other opportunities to redesign the site and it was decided to start from a clean sheet [again] - reuisng the material as far as possible. Overall it worked well.

Overview

Summary

Another site had been established using Drupal 7 and it was working well - after a very steep learing curve. Drupal has a multi-site capability ie it is possible to configure more than one website based on the same software. Each site requires its own database.

We soon ran into hosting issues when the site locked everyone out - it happened often and the hosting provider [123-Reg] claimed that the database disc space had been exceeded - even though the internal size was just a few Mb.

Of course upgrading the hosting package helped the problem....£

Overview

Summary

The Serif WebPlus software remained fragile - there was no CSS (to my knowledge). The html page output was overly simple, mostly fragments: text segmemts, colour bars, and images.

While the site content grew, probably to its highest level to date - it was difficult to see a development path forward with this approach. This was due to the site content being locked in the proprietary workfile and the html [fragments] could not sensibly be reused. By now a second site [mapping related[ was being formulated ..... and the first rewrite of 3KH was looming.

Overview

Summary

The Serif WebPlus software proved to be very fragile. An upgrade from X4 to X6 helped but lockups still remained though less frequently. This meant frequent backups. Though this did not save an hours edit work unless you backed up the site during that time.

The hosting platform was 123-Reg, files being uploaded by FileZilla. There was no problem with a small set of html pages.