This blog has moved, permanently, to mavergames.net

I migrated this blog to Drupal. Please visit mavergames.net and update your RSS feed to this one.

Thanks!

Chris

Librarian Bloggers: Librarians who blog

I just discovered and joined the Librarian Bloggers site. I have to say that the site is really well done. I created a profile and simply added an RSS from this blog and dragged it to the center of my profile so that when I blog from here, it posts there. Have a look at my profile. Really simply designed and user-friendly site – wouldn’t expect anything less from my librarian colleagues

Seems like a great site to join for networking opportunities, information sharing and learning about other librarians who blog. I still need to explore all of the options and configuration choices for the site but on first use, I have to give it huge props!

Drupal and CVS and “clean builds” and backends and huh?

Okay, I’m admittedly NOT a programmer or IT systems person. I’m a librarian by training, who has, through years of effort, become a web manager and information architect. So, when our programmers suggest some possible frameworks for our Drupal installation’s backend, I’m just clueless.

There is testing going on right now to create a backend CVS repository for maintaining our Drupal installation(s), I say “sure, why not!” Then, when terms like “clean build” start getting thrown around, I’m lost. Is using a CVS repository in this way simply a way to manage the Drupal files? I would have thought Drupal itself would have a way to manage versions and the versions of it’s modules, etc. Is this overkill to create such a backend way of managing one’s Drupal installation? Couldn’t we just make backups of all files and databases on a regular (hourly, daily) basis and restore the files if there is a problem. Doesn’t Drupal store, via Devel Module, who changes what and thus, in a sense, “versions” of what’s configured?

Also, our Drupal is installed in a manage cloud environment, Rackspace Cloud Sites. How does this proposed backend interact with the cloud?

So many questions… Can anyone who “speaks IT” help me understand these issues, please?

More “Cloud” issues

Mosso’s Cloud Sites hosting environment, now the Rackspace Cloud (What was wrong with Mosso?), has worked brilliantly so far after an initial scare (see earlier post here). Last week, we reached another perceived impasse where we thought, again, that we needed a Cloud Server in order to accomplish a multi-site Drupal installation. Our programmers just couldn’t see how we could get away without shell access to the Cloud Sites environment on the Rackspace Cloud where can do more complex configuration than perhaps Drupal itself, in php, would allow.

Alas, after discussing our concerns with our Systems Administrator and chatting with someone at Rackspace (their “fanatical tech support” is still great!), we are sticking with the Cloud Sites platform. The scalability of Cloud Sites, the low cost factor and the managed environment (no server updates, Apache configuration, keeping MySQL up-to-date, etc.) is very desirable for our needs. Ironically, in reading about Cloud computing and setting up systems similar to what we’re doing, the theme was repeated over and over: “your IT or Systems folks will want more control, root access, etc.” – however, in our case, it was our Systems person who asked repeatedly: “Why do you need root access” and argued against it for the reasons I cite above (scalability, managed server environment, etc.) and ultimately convinced us that we think that indeed we do NOT need root access, at least at this point.

So, we’re diving deeply into our programming and implementation phase of preparing Drupal for ca. 70 sites, each with their own Drupal but managed from a central or master Drupal install – “Multi-site with single codebase” as it’s called in Drupalese.