Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
You have a broad plan. Say, you want to move your website to a new host. I’ve been running this site (which is a WordPress multisite that also includes my partner’s blog, the blog we originally created to share pictures of our kids, a personal portflolio-type site of mine, a recipe site, and a demo site for my progress bar plugin) on Digital Ocean for a long time, and I’ve wanted to migrate it to Pantheon (where I work) basically since joining. The problem (to a degree) is that the Composer-based architecture I originally built this site around was based on Altis while I was at Human Made. And the migration from that Composer-based structure to a new but different Composer-based structure was not particularly obvious or smooth. Originally, I wanted to keep the original GitHub repository I had created and been managing my site code since I built this iteration and just push it to a new location, but in retrospect, I think that ended up being more of a blocker than just rebuilding the site in a similar way in a different repository.
Recently, I’ve been going back to this idea, especially as a developer advocate in the spirit of doing things our customers do. So, I’ve actually been thinking a lot about, and planning for, what a migration could include, and I’ve already set up a repository using our new, not-yet-in-beta GitHub application that uses a GitHub repository as the application codeserver and cuts out the middle layer of requiring GitHub to push to the Pantheon repository.
But, as is want to happen when your brain is hard-wired to solving problems, I started trying to figure out what sites really needed to be migrated and one of them that seems pretty important is the kidsblog. This site has gone through a number of (partially failed) migrations, specifically, and lost a lot of content along the way, both post content (in some cases) and images, from when files were stored in different locations. So the update here is that I’m actually going back and fixing broken image links and replacing them with links to those files (or as close equivalents as I can find) on Dropbox. It’s not 1:1 and in some cases the originals are unidentifiable or lost forever (especially in the beginning before we standardized on a naming convention for files). Those files have gone through various migrations and meltdowns, too, before we pushed everything up to Dropbox as the source of truth. So, before I migrate the site, I need to fix the broken images. That seems to be coming along pretty well, actually, and I’m not worried about that, but it’s a tedious, manual process. (I’m going in reverse order, for the record, so if you go to the site now and look at the most recent posts, they’ll probably all still be broken. But the oldest ones are working up to December 2006.)
Before I could even start on that, though, I had to fix an issue with the pagination. See, there was some code that I was using from some plugin or add-on or who knows what that no longer existed and broke the page navigation and had been broken for who knows how long. There were some other issues in there that I fixed, too, that were largely the result of the theme being very, very old. All that’s fixed now, and it’s actually pretty rewarding because the theme holds up pretty well, I think.
Okay, so fixing the kidsblog being part of the process, I most recently decided to add a new page to the site for videos, podcasts and presentations I’ve given, made or appeared on since I went on Talking Drupal a couple weeks ago, I’m guesting on a podcast this week and another one next month. And I thought a record of the various videos I’ve recorded at Pantheon (and elsewhere) would be a good thing to have and link to if I want to continue doing DevRel in the future.
After the page was created, I decided it should be a submenu item under Articles (I might swap those or make a higher level page called “content” or something, but that seems weird), and when I did that, it broke the articles nav link. My nav menu is too big, you see — or at least the theme thinks so, and I keep having to make manual tweaks to correct for the number of menu items I have and the addition of a down arrow button for the dropdown was enough to make the word Articles wrap in an unattractive way. (At least for me when I make the window 50% of my screen size — so already I realize it’s a “me” thing and it has to do with using a non-standard width, but if I can’t make my site look good to me, then what’s the point?
This sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to isolate the CSS rules and site template hacks necessary to offset the width issue. I think I’ve gotten it fixed now, at least for now. But, you know, a couple hours later after what was supposed to be just adding a new page on my site and we’re not even touching the actual migration part yet. So, that’s what’s happening with me. How are you doing? 😅
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