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University of Washington

Drupal admin blog

This blog is intended for Drupal admins who are using the School of Nursing's Drupal build.

May

26

2011-05-26 Update

Updated on May 16th, 2012 at 5:05 pm

Updates

The deploy script (deploy.sh) and the config sql helper file (config.sql) were updated to fix a minor bug. The Email Address for Failure Notices in the default Backup and Migrate profile was wrongly configured.

Upgrade path

Any deployments of revision 2396 or lower that have backups configured need to be manually updated (basically all sites that were deployed before this date). Site administrators need to do the following:

  • navigate the admin menu to: Content management > Backup and Migrate > Profiles
  • edit the Default Settings profile
  • go to Advanced Options
  • update the field labeled "Email Address for Failure Notices" to an email address other than "tier@uw.edu", most likely your own email or some departmental email address
  • Save profile

 

A fresh checkout of the deploy script will receive the updated deploy script and config sql helper file.

May

23

2011-05-23 Update

Updated on May 31st, 2011 at 5:13 pm

Updates

The Webform module had a security update.

Upgrade Path

  1. SSH into your server and change to the Drupal directory (~/public_html/drupal).
  2. Run:
    svn update
  3. Run:
    drush updatedb
    This will update your site and flush your Drupal caches.

May

6

Drupal Training 102 is now online!

Updated on May 6th, 2011 at 11:45 am

The second installment of our Drupal training series has been finished and is now online!

Drupal Training 102 is for those intending on being a section editor (or above) in the Drupal build designed by the School of Nursing.

In the course, we'll go over how to approve or reject changes made by content creators, how to manage your section’s menus, and other rights and responsibilities of being a section editor.

The course is hosted on our Moodle instance and requires you to either login with your UW NetID, with a ProtectNetwork account, or as a guest.

Visit Drupal Training 102: Drupal for Section Editors

Drupal Training 101 is a prerequisite for this course.

May

4

2011-05-04 Update

Updated on May 31st, 2011 at 5:14 pm

Updates

  • The deploy script (deploy.sh) was updated to fix a minor bug. If you copy backups made by Drupal from a homer account to your own fileserver via WebDAV, a backup log is written with the commands that were run, ~/backups/backup.log. This log was not being truncated. It is now cleared every Saturday.
  • The deploy script (deploy.sh) was updated so that you can specify the UW Groups site name you want to use, in addition to the group stem. Previously, you would supply a group stem (such as uw_mydept_web) and Drupal would use the masking URL as the site name, or depts.washington.edu if none was supplied.

    However, there were cases where admins wanted multiple sites without masking URLs. With the build script as it was, all of those sites would share the same groups, as all of their groups would start with [group_stem]_depts.washington.edu_….

    It is now possible to specify the site name you want to use. It still defaults to the masking URL (or depts.washington.edu if none is supplied), but you can enter your own, e.g. bob. Using the example stem above, that site’s groups would be uw_mydept_web_bob_…

    The Technical Documentation.docx file was also updated to reflect the changes made to the deploy process.

Upgrade path

There is no need to upgrade any existing sites. As long as you do a fresh checkout of the deploy script whenever you deploy a new site, you will receive the updated deploy script.

If you want the updated docs, you can download them at: https://svn.cac.washington.edu/public/son/sontier/public/drupal/current/docs/docs.zip

Apr

21

2011-04-21 Update

Updated on May 31st, 2011 at 5:16 pm

Updates

The UW theme’s CSS had a minor update. A top margin is now only applied to side bar content if there is also a side menu above it.

Upgrade Path

  1. SSH into your server and change to the Drupal directory (~/public_html/drupal).
  2. Run:
    svn update
  3. Flush your Drupal caches.

Apr

19

2011-04-19 Update

Updated on May 31st, 2011 at 5:17 pm

Updates

The .htaccess file was updated to fix a couple of bugs:

  1. You can now deploy Drupal on staff, faculty, and course accounts without modifying the .htaccess file.
  2. We were seeing that on certain occasions that the cron job would fail. When curl would attempt to access http://[your-domain]/cron.php, it was being rewritten by mod_rewrite into /index.php?q=/cron.php, which would cause Drupal to throw a 404. This no longer happens.

Deployment docs were updated to reflect this change.

Upgrade Path

  1. SSH into your server and change to the Drupal directory (~/public_html/drupal).
  2. Run:
    svn update
  3. Flush your Drupal caches.

Apr

14

Drupal Training 101 is now online!

Updated on May 6th, 2011 at 11:43 am

The first installement of our Drupal training series has been finished and is now online!

Drupal Training 101 provides an introduction for users to the School of Nursing’s CMS. The goal of the course is to provide enough training and information for a person to go from no knowledge of Drupal to being a competent content creator and having a basic understanding of how content control works in Drupal.

The course is hosted on our Moodle instance and requires you to either login with your UW NetID, with a ProtectNetwork account, or as a guest.

Visit Drupal Training 101: Introduction to Drupal.

The follow-up course, Drupal Training 102, is geared to those intending on being section editors in Drupal.

Apr

11

2011-04-11 Update

Updated on May 31st, 2011 at 5:18 pm

Updates

The module son_webpage_paths was updated to fix a bug where settings weren't properly saved when creating a new node.

Upgrade Path

  1. SSH into your server and change to the Drupal directory (~/public_html/drupal).
  2. Run:
    svn update
  3. Flush your Drupal caches.

Apr

8

2011-04-08 Update

Updated on April 8th, 2011 at 4:33 pm

The deploy script (deploy.sh) was updated to properly escape database password values when writing them to the Drupal settings file (~/public_html/drupal/sites/default/settings.php).

Previously, characters such as spaces, at signs (@), and other non-alphanumeric characters could potentially break the database connection string, which is written out as a URL. Now, the MYDRUPALDBPASSWORD value has any single- or double-quote characters (' or ") stripped out and is then URL encoded. 

Apr

5

2011-04-05 Update

Updated on April 6th, 2011 at 3:15 pm

Updates

  1. The deploy script (deploy.sh) was changed so that Production deployments would pull from a new URL. Originally, the deploy script pulled from a publically-accessible location. However, some svn updates would fail due to how publically accessible folders work in SVN. The script now pulls from a location that is accessible to any NetID.
  2. Deploying Drupal.docx was changed to reflect the above update.
  3. The sonsite module was updated to reflect improvements and bugfixes to two rules, Update PathAuto and Node updated by content creator.
    • Update PathAuto was updated to make generating node aliases more efficient when Folder terms are updated—rather than simply updating every node in Drupal, it now only updates the nodes that were actually affected by the term change.
    • Node updated by content creator was changed so that updates performed by the Link Checker module wouldn’t cause the node to go into revision moderation and require approval. That is, changes made by Link Checker no longer need to be approved by a section/site editor.
  4. The image_reference module was updated. It now provides an extra field to views, Image path, which is the path to any images attached to an Image node.
  5. A number of additional modules were added into SVN.

Upgrade Path

Getting the new rules and modules

  1. SSH into your server and change to the Drupal directory (~/public_html/drupal).
  2. Run:
    svn update
  3. Flush your Drupal caches.
  4. If you’ve modified the two rules that were updated, you will need to merge the changes.

Updating your working copy’s URL (related to update 1 above)

The previous URL for the production Drupal code still works, so if you don’t want to change it, you don’t have to. However, we were encountering issues where if certain types of changes were made (e.g., svn copy, svn mv), running svn update on a working copy that was checked out at the publicly available URL would fail and foobar the working copy. So, it is recommended to switch to the new URL.

  1. Put your site into maintenance mode.
  2. SSH into your server and change to the Drupal directory (~/public_html/drupal).
  3. Run:
    svn status
    to see what files have been added or modified since your last checkout
  4. Copy any added or modified files to somewhere outside of the ~/public_html/drupal folder. Be sure to copy your sites/default/settings.php file and sites/default/files directory.
  5. Make the sites/default folder and sites/default/settings.php file writeable. You can do this by running the following:
    chmod +w ~/public_html/drupal/sites/default
    chmod +w ~/public_html/drupal/sites/default/settings.php
  6. Erase your ~/public_html/drupal folder. You can do this by running:
    rm -rf ~/public_html/drupal
    If you get any errors about not being able to remove any files or folders, make sure they’re writeable and try erasing again.
  7. Checkout the Drupal code from the new SVN location. Run:
    svn co https://svn.cac.washington.edu/son/sontier/public/drupal/current/drupal/ ~/public_html/drupal
    You may be asked for a username and/or password. Any NetID username/password combination will work, including a supplemental NetID. You may also be asked if you want to store the NetID password unencrypted; it’s up to you if you want SVN to remember your credentials or not.
  8. Move the files you copied in step 2 above back to their original location. If you had to modify any file or folder permissions in order to copy them in the first place, make sure to change them back. sites/default should be set to 0x0555 (readable and executable by all, but not writeable by anyone). sites/default/settings.php should be set to 0x0444 (readable by all, but not executable or writeable by anyone).
    You can change the permissions from the command line by once again using the chmod command:
    chmod 555 ~/public_html/drupal/sites/default
    chmod 444 ~/public_html/drupal/sites/default/settings.php
  9. Flush your Drupal caches.
  10. Take your site out of maintenance mode.
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