Wow, what a week! They just keep getting better and better. I’m writing this post on the Monday of week 5, but it’s a provincial holiday (Family Day) here in Ontario and I didn’t get around to writing it last week so, here goes.

This week saw a lot of research on the Drupal modules and nailing down a concrete page flow-chart that I sent off to the folks at Big Jump Productions.

At the end of the week I was asked for my WordPress blog files so that they could be uploaded to the web server and made live.  I had never done this before and only knew how to do it in theory.  Thanks to some wonderful help from the WordPress community in the form of blogs and forum posts, I successfully got a local install of WordPress to migrate successfully to a web server for all the world see.

It involved working with phpMyAdmin, and using my text editor (TextWrangler), to search & replace all the instances of “localhost” in my database with the actual URL of the live site. A great resource for this came from here from the folks over at revolution-media.net in Ireland.

The real problem came when I somehow missed a few instances of the old localhost addresses in the database.  I didn’t know this at the time.  All I know was when I went to visit the blog online and the page looked like just text and html links on a white background.  When I moused over any of the links I could see down in my status bar in my browser that they were linking back to their old localhost addresses. Now here is were I made things worse. Instead of going back into my exported databse SQL file and seeing if I had missed any of the localhost links, I opend up my local developement installation of the wordpress site and logged in as administarator. I was looking for anything in the settings that might still be pointing to the old “localhost” address. Of course, I found on the settings page, that there were two such settings. “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Blog Address (URL)”. In a fatal moment of missguided intuition, I changed them both over to the online URL (ie. www.blog.com). As soon as I clicked the Save Changes button, I was immediately logged out and couldn’t get back in. Confused I went to access phpMyAdmin through MAMP.

Well, trying to even view the Start page in MAMP I was hit with a “403 Forbidden You don’t have permission to access / on this server” message. My heart sunk. Now what? A few google searches later and I found out that what I did, caused WordPress to place a .htaccess file (which is, by default, hidden on a MAC) and what it contained was causing MAMP to throw up that 403 error. There were a few suggestions on how to fix this, but the best came form here. The last comment contains the best answer IMHO. It’s from catherinwonderland and shows you how to simply show the hidden file and delete it. It’s that simple.

So, that got MAMP working again, but I still could’t log into the local site.  Rather than waste any more time trying to hack PHP files or dig through the mySQL database (which is where I was about to go next), I remembered I did a complete system backup of my computer on Friday.  That backup contained, amongst other things, the complete WordPress site and database. It was all contained in the MAMP folder, in the applications folder, on the MAC.  I renamed the MAMP folder that was there and copied over the MAMP folder form the external backup drive. Problem solved! And a BIG lesson learned. Don’t mess with settings that effect your site on a root level. You could lock yourself out, like I did.

Well, it’s back to work tomorrow and I can’t wait.  The WordPress blog is going to be live and will only require routine maintenance and administration from now on.  The Drupal CMS will hopefully be ready for a test session by week’s end. I’ll keep you posted

Thanks to a meeting with the owners and senior staff at Big Jump Productions this week, there is greater assurance that everything is moving in the right direction. Trying to design the Drupal platform (a powerful open source content management system) around an animation production pipeline has its challenges. Namely, how to pole and present the data contained within to different users.  So far, I have been focusing on the basic episodic production hierarchy of production/episode/scene.  You could also use other names like project/show/shot.  They are same but for the sake of designing a system to manage it, we’ll settle on the former example. Now I need to address the hierarchy of departments with the production.

Also decided in the meeting, was the move away from managing file uploading/downloading with the CMS .  This was mostly because of the load it might put on the system.  Productions are all full HD so some scene files coming out of Flash could top 70 MB or more.  Storyboards, which are drawn all digitally, have to be sectioned up because a given sequence of scenes could produce a Flash file well over 150 MB. It’s disappointing that Drupal can’t do it all, and who knows, maybe it can, but, for now it’ll have to be a two-tiered system.  The first tier is Drupal and very efficient, and the second tier will still have user uploading/downloading files to server folders both in-house and over FTP when connecting from out-of-house. Perhaps after things have been up and running for a while, I’ll test a small department with their file uploading/downloading needs and see how the system handles it.

So next week we set up the web server and move over the WordPress Blog.  If that goes well, there will be time to move the Drupal CMS over as well. The CMS is a password protected site, o I am not worried about continuing development in a live setting. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve got a couple more weeks before I want to introduce users to the CMS.  There will be a lot of streamlining and the training to do before that happens. It should be an interesting week, next week.