Zikula Blog

Yesterday evening the German Zikula team relaunched its main support site at support.zikula.de. Three team-members worked since early afternoon till about 19:30 when we finally opened the site to the public.

---

Andreas Krapohl aka larsneo started the site named post-nuke.net back in the spring of 2002 and it has been updated ever since. We relaunched the site with new layouts twice since then, moved server several times, and are now happy to present it now on a brand new server in our new Zikula corporate design.

The age of the installation can be seen all over the place: New blocks have three digit IDs! Even new permission rules are three digits long! Isn't it good to know that Zikula can handle this?

When I started working on the upgrade yesterday I was 100% sure that it would not succeed the first time. Thus I disabled at 14:00h the old site and assumed that by 17:00h we would have figured out that it's not as easy as it's supposed to be and we'd switch back to the old site to learn from our mistakes and make a new attempt the next weekend.

But it turned out to not be that complicated. That was partly due to Andreas' great preparations: Our database is so big that you can't just import/export it via phpMyAdmin or some other PHP tool. He created a dump- and a restore-server-script which made this task a job of 10 minutes - half the time was lost for downloading and uploading the zipped 28MB dump-file.

The automatic upgrade-scripts included in Zikula did a good job. There was only one strange problem with the user's data. We had to reset that and run only that part of the upgrade-script again.

Mateo made a great job in preparing the new theme for adoption of the national communities. We had to work on only a few templates. There were only the specifically German content-features left to adopt:

• We had to empty the text in the coloured buttons to the right and lay over it real text, to be able to adjust the latest version number without GIMP.
• We customized the Group-list template and added a Page to the top for the support team and the foundation members.
• The links in the navigation had to point to our sites.
• And the top-navigation had to be adjusted to fit our needs.

Today we are putting together the last bits and pieces that remain to be done: Writing some content for all the empty linked pages and so on.

All in all it was a lot of work but there were only few really hard things to be solved. We are happy with the new site and the comments show that the users are equally satisfied.