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Collection, Preservation and Display of Old Lawn Mowers

Site Upgrade 2015

This site has recently been upgraded to use the latest content management software. It was the first major upgrade since 2009 when we migrated the club's original HTML site to the Drupal content management system (CMS). During the past five and half years we have added a lot of new content to the site and rearranged the structure to include sections to make it easier to find the various content.

Drupal is a popular open-source CMS that comprises a core providing the basic site functionality with additional features enabled by separate modules. In this way site administrators can built sites which incorporate only the functions and features they need. Systems like this store all important content in a central database with the appearance of the site dictated by a combination of templates, settings and style sheets. Unlike old-fashioned websites the pages are created "on demand" by calling the relevant data and loading it into the relevant templates. Among other advantages this allows websites to present and reuse data in different ways with a degree of interactivity for the user.

The upgrade was necessary because some of the underlying software was nearing a time when it would not be supported. The hosting platform also has some technical restrictions that meant that the site could sometimes run slowly and exceed the maximum allowed database size. In addition to removing these potential limitations upgrading the website will allow us to add new content and features more easily in the future. Initially the site will appear more or less the same.

Work completed during the upgrade included:

  • Migrate main CMS from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7
  • Migrate to latest version of MySQL database
  • Move data to new server with larger database capacity
  • Migrate to latest version of PHP hosting platform
  • Update all modules from Drupal 7 to Drupal 7
  • Replace unsupported modules with alternatives where possible
  • Check settings for old and new modules to retain site functions
  • Add new sections to website
  • Check each section for consistency with URL names

The majority of the upgrade was completed at the end of January. Since then we have been completing additional tests and tweaking the settings on some of the new modules to enable features and ensure content appears as it should, when it should.

It was not possible to migrate the image galleries of the club's event to the new website because the module we used for this in Drupal 6 does not work in Drupal 7. Rather than hold up the entire upgrade we decided to remove this section temporarily until we can find an alternative way to show these images.

The site has been tested extensively before, during and after the upgrade. Feedback from club members and site visitors has been very useful in this process. If you spot anything that does not seem to be working properly please send an email to the site administrator.