» #csuc09 - Cascade Conference, “Site Migration” 9/29/2009<
Brent Arrington, Services Developer, Hannon Hill. “Site Migration.”
Site Migration
Extreme example—you can have someone be the administrator in one site and contributor in another site.
This is a tutorial on how to migration into using Sites.
Pre-migration Preparation
…missed a bunch of steps…
- Analyze current Global Site structure
- *
Pre-migration Preparation Continued…
Treat migration as a major rollout
- Not a trivial process
- Full QA of sites will be needed
- Very likely to be code changes necessary—pay particular attention to any formats relying on index blocks
- Work in development instance first
- Rollback strategy: backup your database before migrating
No undo—make sure you have a full database backup before migrating sites.
Site Migration Wizard
[screenshot] Found in the Utilities menu
Demo has two sites with shared template, blocks, and formats. Showing two sites – example.com and example.edu in the Global area.
Using the site migration wizard.
- Gave the site name example.com
- Site URL: http://www.example.com
- Default Metadata Set
- Target: picked the parent level target for the example.com site
- Gave a notice of all the destinations—any destination you do not select as part of this process is basically lost. Best to choose all the destinations listed.
Next screen of wizard: Role, User, and Groups
- Moved the Example Site Manage Role to the right; didn’t move users or groups at this time.
Next: Confirm
- Test migration—always want to run the test migration first and it will give you warnings and errors.
- Errors must be resolved before the migration wizard will run.
- Warnings are items to be aware of that you might want to adjust, but the migration will still go through (there just may be some unexpected behavior)
- If a sub-Target has no destination associated with it that Target will be removed (with Sites they’ve gotten rid of Targets—only Destinations will be listed with each.) file extension is now defined in the Configuration Set*.
Submit
- Make take a few minutes—depends on how large the site is.
- When done, the CSS didn’t look quite right—all the links inside the CSS files (using [system-asset] tags too) didn’t get rewritten.
// yay! I don’t think our CSS is going to break when migrated.
Next: migration of example.edu
// same steps as previous site
Context navigation isn’t rendering properly. Likely script format.
Fix: adjust path in XSL.
Back to Global
Looking through for assets that should be moved out of the global area. Recommends moving common stuff into its own site—easier on permissions and linking between sites.
Copying assets
Note you can’t copy assets between Sites. You should set up sites with their own copy of images and items that can’t be shared before migration—do this in the Global area first, then migrate the sites. The Global area doesn’t have the site URL associated with it, which makes linking between Global site assets and other Sites tricky. You could set up a common site with those assets, or you can have individual copies of those assets in each site that needs it.
Cascade is designed to go from Global to Sites, but not Sites to Sites.
// I think we should migrate on the test server first, then production. That way we know what the problems are and how long it will take for each site.