Jul
7
2008
Whew! This was a long time coming, and just a tad more than a CSS reboot. We rearchitected the pingVision website from the ground up. Since the initial site had started with Drupal 4.5, there was a lot of legacy cruft in the database, left behind by modules no longer in use and, I have to admit, experiments I tried that didn't quite work out. The old site was launched in January 2005, back when Drupal was still pretty new to me. I've learned some things since then.
So we started over, and simply imported the published content, existing users and taxonomy structures. It was a lot easier than tracking down tables, variables and indexes left behind by modules of yore.
You may have noticed that we now have a video section. As I write this we have nothing completed yet, but we'll have some videos up very soon. We're very excited to get this part of the pingVision creative work back into gear. It's been too long.
This new site, powered by Drupal 6, is the result of weeks of back-burner development and almost a year of architecture and design tweaks, thrashings and polishes. We've leveraged some of our own contributions to the Drupal community, including Nodecarousel and Simplelist, along with some of the wonderful Drupal module staples, such as CCK, Nodequeue, Pathauto and Imagecache.
What do you think? Leave us a comment. We're also giving Mollom a try for comment spam/abuse management, so be nice, or at least polite. ;) And if you find a bug, please spare the comment and just tell us directly.
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Comments
Laura writes:
Mollom is not behaving so we've had to put comments site-wide into moderation for the time being.Turns out we had an errant entry in /etc/hosts on our server that was causing the problems. All is well, and maybe better than before.Michelle writes:
Wow, that's quite a change! Looks nice.
Curious how you went about importing just the important bits? I've got a site with a lot of cruft myself and have been considering just hand copying all the nodes (there's only about 100).
Michelle
John Fiala writes:
We imported the important bits with a fair bit of custom PHP code and a lot of careful work with SQL. Drupal can have some really complex relationships between tables, and I learned a fair bit figuring out how best to move data from one database to the other.
That said, some node types had only a handful of items, and those we did copy over by hand.
Laura writes:
Thanks, Michelle!
I'm doing a flat upgrade of rarepattern.com, and so far on localhost it's been fine. I haven't had time to finish thanks to work demands, but I wouldn't rule it out altogether.
Matt Tucker writes:
What an amazing change. This new site really shows how PingV is planning for massive growth. Congratulations on such a successful new site. It really does show what you are capable of. Congratulations to all of you at Ping!
Laura writes:
Thanks, Matt! Hope we'll be seeing you at a DBUG meet-up this summer!
Tj Holowaychuk writes:
Big improvement for sure! still not really a big fan of the design though sorry :( don't get me wrong though it is certainly much better than before.
Laura writes:
How 'bout I take the last 3 words and bank those? ;) (Thanks!)
Kathleen writes:
I would be very interested to hear details of your deployment management scheme to make such a large back-end change while simultaneously maintaining a live site. And judging from the hits on my blog posts covering such issues, it's quite an interest to the Drupal community, too!
Please, do tell :)
Laura writes:
Thanks for the comment, but I'm afraid it's nothing mysterious, actually. We developed the site locally, imported the old content, staged the site for testing on our staging server, then just pushed it on the live server and changed pointers. Bing!
The live site is actually an svn checkout, so we can continue to maintain the code and test before pushing live. A lot of people follow this practice, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.
JohnForsythe writes:
Nice work, it's definitely an improvement. The orange is a bit too intense for me, but the layout is very nice.
Laura writes:
Thanks! Colors are always the toughest. On some screens the orange may be loud, but if we muted for the high gamma, it might seem a bit muddy on other screens. It's especially so with orange. Blame me for picking these colors in 2005!
What do you think of the colors in the other areas?
Dries writes:
Quite an improvement! I like.
Laura writes:
Thanks, Dries!
Drupal Theme Garden writes:
I like new design of your site.
Now you have more functional and modern site.
Specially, I like how you are using "tabs" on the front page and changing color schemes on some parts of the site.
Congratulations!
Laura writes:
Always appreciate usability feedback. Thanks for commenting!
professional writing help writes:
nice site