2. August 9, 2009

4. About Zimmer Twins

5. Why Upgrade?

6. Why Drupal 6.X?

8. Based in Toronto.

9. Make websites (and web games) aimed primarily at youth and non-profits.

10. Site at http://www.zincroe.com

11. About me (BTMash)

12. Systems programmer.

13. Work at California Institute of the Arts.

15. The show provides a starting story line….

16. And kids create an ending

17. Best videos are given production value and broadcast on television

18. ZT was entering its 3rd season

19. It is currently shown in Canada-Tele-Toon, USA-NBC/Qubo, & Australia-ABC

20. Over 500, 000 members

21. Over 1.2 million user contributed nodes (or movie clips)

22. Over 1.1 million comments

24. Award badges based on total number of points

25. Create contests where users could vote on best content chosen by site editors

26. Improve workflow for switching homepage animations

28. Fairly easy to spam.

30. Modules that were from community were no longer supported (and in case of our newsletters, had broken throttling mechanisms)

31. Easier to build on work done by community to reach the goal.

32. Drupal core has improved by leaps and bounds.

35. Theme registry (use theme devel module to figure out override theme calls/templates which was very useful)

36. Views and CCK (moreso CCK) were not necessary for our site at that time (Views would be helpful but main modules would still require lots of work)

39. The old code was not going to work so you don’t want something enabled that might cause some funny behaviour

41. Upgrades build on top of old versions

42. Safest way to ensure core data is safely upgraded and accounted forSteps 1 & 2 took approximately 2 weeks to iron out other steps in process

44. See which modules can be used from d.o, what contributed modules needed to be upgraded, and which ones would be custom modules

45. Ongoing process as more modules were actively upgraded by rest of community

46. Started by upgrading / creating the smaller sets of modules

47. Modules that didn’t rely on the movie saving / creation.

50. sponsor

51. site_statistics (custom zimmertwins stats)

53. Moviepicks (select additional status for movies)

54. movie_search module (converted to module so we can disable in case of large load on site)

55. abuse

56. watchlist

58. Easy to override core modules (override user module)

59. Adding AJAX (AHAH) functionality was simple (abuse module uses jquery and ahah for moderating content on site)

61. Userpoints

62. Userpoints basic

63. User badges

64. Cache exclude

65. Legal

66. Login toboggan

67. Login destination

69. Very flexible (can be used for more than simple ratings)

70. Hooks to use for other stats

71. Fivestar

72. Messaging

73. Frameworks

74. Token

76. Midway through development timeline, attended Boston Drupal conference.

77. Attended a seminar on messaging and notification frameworks

78. Goal was to create module and api to get rid of the 100+ modules that provided bits and pieces of such functionality

79. Opted to use framework over building own large module to perform same functionality

80. Created module (comment_notifications) to email user when comment added to their node.

82. Userpoints& user badge modules

83. Userpoints has api and hooks to create additional rules on when to award points

84. Userbadges can award badges either to roles or to single user (though single user addition has to be either manually or through rules

85. Created a bridge module that alters user badges form

87. Needed functionality to provide extra css info for a particular node (so our ‘credits’ page could take on extra css rules)

88. Felt providing an ID for a given node was the easiest way to go.

89. Module allowed you to create a specific id for a given node (altered node form to add a css id)

91. Votingapi hook implements check to give movie a ‘crowd-pleaser’ status if it meets requirements in total ratings and average rating.

92. Awards extra userpoints to users on positive change in movie status

93. Comment_spam_control

94. Throttles number of comments an authenticated user can post (1 per minute…which stopped them from spamming a user to watch their movie)

95. Comment_list

97. Allow users to vote on a particular movie

98. Vote as many times as a user wants during the contest (free-for-all)

99. View current tally of votes (or black out for regular users)

100. Refresh page with random set of contestants after vote (using ahah functionality)

101. Can choose if contest should be based around users or nodes and admins enter the uid/nid of the content they want as part of contest.

103. END of Talk on Modules!!!

105. Migrating data

106. Site was under latin1 encoding

107. Drupal 5+ moved towards utf-8 encoding

108. Tough due to size of data.

109. Strip out character encoding of file created from mysqldump (so characters are not saved in utf8 format and garbled.

110. Replace instances of latin1 with utf8

111. Ensure content will migrate to database in utf8 format

114. Issue with users table and usernames

115. In utf8,eva seen to be equal to éva so users who had ‘duplicate’ names would not be inserted into the database

116. Login was painfully slow

117. Usernames entered by user were compared with lowercase version of all names on site – check in mysql alone took nearly 3 seconds.

118. Choices

119. Keep table in latin1 encoding and deal with character encoding discrepancies

120. Keep name column in utf8-binary encoding (so eva is not same as éva but deal with slow login.

121. Opted for the latter

122. Found issue on d.o dealing with slow login (http://drupal.org/node/83738)

124. Tested out ability to upgrade site multiple times

125. Large dataset

126. Needed to document full upgrade path.

127. Created a migration script so data from deprecated modules (about, extras, favourites and more) would migrate over to the new in-use module (page, favourite_node, etc)

128. Needed to see time to complete upgrade.

130. Ensure new site is under correct encoding or you'll pull your hair out!!!

131. Don't always go for the latest and greatest

132. many modules had not been ported over to D6 when we started on the project--as an easy example, no views or cck at the time.

133. That said…was a great opportunity for us to help out with upgrading the modules.

134. Use the Drupal overrides to your advantage.

135. Take advantage of drupal’s multisite

136. Previously all modules were in core module directory, site structure was in such a way that zimmertwinsaustralia and zimmertwins USA had to run from separate directories

137. Now fixed so lower memory usage

139. Site performs very well under load

140. Maintenance on modules is easier (even though there are now 55 modules versus 31, actively maintaining at most 15 modules as opposed to over 20)

141. Newsletters actually work

142. Recently sent out approx 150k email newsletters without any glitches

143. Recently upgraded the Australian version of the ZT site to D6 as well

145. Integration with views

146. Look into search technologies (sphinx, lucene) and possible ways to using it on site