Happy Pixels - Florian Lorétan

Upgrading large & complex sites

Florian — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:45:38 +0000

Upgrading Drupal websites from one major version to the next is painful. Most people solve the problem by sticking with the old version, and I've seen a lot of people give up after trying for many days. I've myself done a good amount of (successful) upgrades from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 in the past year and decided to share my experience and hopefully help some people get through with it. My presentation Upgrading Drupal takes a look at what issues make those upgrades so damn problematic and what solutions we can implement to solve them. I'll be giving the presentation for the third time at DrupalCamp Spain this coming week-end, and I proposed it as a session for DrupalCon SF (please vote!).

The two main problems with upgrades are complexity and time: a lot of operations need to be performed in a specific order within a short period of time to minimize downtime. Any solution that addresses these two problems will need to be automated, and the best way to do this that I found involved a VCS, drush and some minimal shell scripting. The presentation is about the WHY's, and this article is about the HOW's, with more implementation details that wouldn't fit well in a presentation.

Just hang your coat on the tree

Florian — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:39:43 +0000

No, I'm not talking about trees as a data structure, I'm talking about branches where you can actually hang stuff. Apparently people liked the coat-hanger tree in the hallway of our apartment, and those who couldn't see it in person asked for pictures. It took more time to decide how to make it than to actually do it, but we had a lot of fun doing both.

DrupalCamp Vienna

Florian — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:37:05 +0000

I'm back in the office after a wonderful week-end in Vienna. DrupalCamp Vienna and the surrounding activities were great to meet new faces, catch up with friends and build new relationships.

Upgrading Drupal

Florian — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:13:50 +0000

Here are the slides for my presentation Upgrading Drupal at DrupalCamp Vienna and the updated version for FOSDEM.

DrupalCon Paris 2009

Florian — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:55:44 +0000

Right after I got my new appartment in Munich, I'm going to head off to Paris for DrupalCon. I'll be getting there a few days early to visit the city and meet with a few people, so let me know if you'll be around and want to pre-drupalize. I won't be presenting this time, so I'll have more time for everything else!

Migrating from Subversion to Bazaar

admin — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 19:21:33 +0000

There are a lot of options when moving from Subversion to a next-generation Version Control System, but Bazaar's ability to interact with a subversion repository can make the transition easy and painless. While it is possible to use the bzr command in a subversion checkout or use it to connect to a subversion repository, you sometimes want to completely move to Bazaar and stop using subversion at all. Here's how to do it.

Setting up loggerhead on ubuntu

Florian — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:59:53 +0000

I recently had to set up a web viewer for a bzr branch hosted on my ubuntu server and decided to go with loggerhead as it seems to be the most commonly used one. However, all the instructions I could find have been written before the inclusion of loggerhead in the ubuntu repositories, so here is an updated tutorial on how to install and configure loggerhead on ubuntu.

Drupal Media Camp Switzerland

Florian — Sat, 09 May 2009 09:37:42 +0000

Drupal Media Camp Switzerland took place this week-end, less than a year after the idea of a Swiss DrupalCamp was introduced at a Drupal user group meeting in Zurich. This event was full of good presentations, exciting moments and networking opportunities, and I believe it was very successful in increasing the adoption of the Drupal CMS on the Swiss market. It was particularly interesting to have the Swiss-german Radio DRS and the news publisher Edipresse provide yet another example showing that Drupal can support large amounts of traffic and also generated some great conversation on various topics surrounding high-traffic websites.

RDF in Core code sprint: more details

Florian — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:11:42 +0000

The RDF code sprint is now less than a week away, and it's time to give you a quick update. For more information have a look at the original announcement as well as last week's blog post from Stephane Corlosquet.

We now have a few more participants, with Stefan Freudenberg, Frédéric G. Marand, Mark Birbeck and John Morahan joining us. There is still room for one more person, so if you are familiar with theming, the Fields API and/or writing tests we would be happy to have you with us.

Happy Pixels goes naked!

Florian — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:53:53 +0000

Happy Pixels is a proud participant of the CSS Naked Day. I'm using Brent Hardinge's naked.module for Drupal. It turns out the Happy Pixels theme is doing pretty well without stylesheets, and Drupal's administration pages do too. I'm writing this post from a very bare interface, but it's still usable (even if I have to admit that the admin_menu dropdowns are a little funky).