Posted by trista13 on May 6, 2011 at 7:26pm
So, today we went live with our new Drupal site!! The URL is bitterrootpubliclibrary.org. Please feel free to check it out and give me pointers, advice, etc. It still definitely needs some work... I'm working on making the sidebars work better on a smaller screen and I have a few links to fix. I'll also start deleting some of the sample content and hopefully add real content.
A big (really big!) thank you to Scott and Andy. Without the class and your guidance the site never would have made it!
Comments
Yay!
Congratulations, Trista! You should be very proud of the work you've done. You've created a product much better than many are able to create as a first Drupal site.
I've run into a few bugs, which I'm sure you're aware of:
Best,
Scott
Scott Rouse
http://about.me/scott.rouse
Thanks! I wasn't expecting it
Thanks! I wasn't expecting it to be live today, so I'm not in a good place to troubleshoot. Sounds like the URLs are based on the temp URL... I'm not sure why the clean URLs would be broken, but I'll mess around with it tonight.
Looks Great
No worries. Looks great. Not trying to be critical at all...just trying to help.
Scott Rouse
http://about.me/scott.rouse
Of course!! I really
Of course!! I really appreciate you pointing that out! My IT guy and I agreed it would be in limbo this weekend, but ready to roll on Monday. Thought I'd let you guys know early just for these sort of things!
I'm working on fixing the
I'm working on fixing the link error, but I can't log in to the new site because all I get is the 500 error, but the site is working fine on the temp URL we got from Bluehost. Are there changes that need to be made in the database or php files to get everything working right?
Oh, and if you want to see the site as it should be go to http://66.147.244.234/~bitterr2/
I think it's really up now!
Ok... I got in touch with Bluehost and one of there techs helped me get the links straightened out. He had to change something in htaccess file. If someone could tell me where that's located, that would be awesome. I really want to see what he did so I know for the future. I reloaded all the photos and I think everything is good to go! Please let me know if you see anything that's funky! Now, I'm going to enjoy an IPA at Blacksmith Brewing! :)
.htaccess
Just got back from a bike ride, and I was about to ask you to check the .htaccess file. The file in question should be located at your site's docroot.
It's typically a hidden file (since it starts with a "."), so you may have to change some preference in your FTP client to be able to see it.
A bit more about .htaccess and Drupal can be found here: http://drupal.org/getting-started/clean-urls
Scott Rouse
http://about.me/scott.rouse
Very nice!
Trista I have been following your progress and must say I am impressed. Your site has a nice clean usable look to it. One of the things I noticed is that the page speed is low. If you have and use Firebug for Firefox it will lead you to the areas you can maximize.
I know you have a lot on your plate with the site and page speed is probably low on the totem pole so it isn't the biggest thing to concern yourself with right now.
Director Updates link gives me this:
The page isn't redirecting properly
Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept
cookies.
In fact nearly all the links seem to have gone south on you?
Still nice work. Congrats so far!
~Christopher
Thank you Chris for the kind
Thank you Chris for the kind words. I also noticed the slow upload speed of the sight, but I'm not sure how to troubleshoot that, so any advice is greatly appreciated. I just tried the links you mentioned and they seem to work. They were not working earlier, but with some help from the Bluehost tech, I think that's been fixed. Please let me know if they are still not working for you.
Thanks again!
Aggregation/Caching
Trista,
As Christopher said, looking great.
There are a few things from a technical standpoint that are probably less than optimal. First and foremost, Bluehost did evil things by hacking the .htaccess file to just point the site to a hard-coded development address: http://66.147.244.234/~bitterr2/. You'll definitely want to resolve that. It should resolve the infinite loop redirect issue Christopher was alluding to.
To speed things up, you'll want to do all you can on the Drupal side:
After you make sure that's in order, running Page Speed and/or YSlow, as Christopher mentioned, can help identify other potential areas for improvement.
Please let me know if you'd like some help with the .htaccess issue. Those can be pretty tricky to troubleshoot. It's probably something we could best resolve over the phone/screen share.
Congratulations, again, on a job well done.
Scott Rouse
http://about.me/scott.rouse
.htaccess
Thanks for the suggestions for getting the page to speed up. I looked over the pages about the .htacess file. If I go into the administration pages and set up clean URLs, can I then comment out the Rewrite Base? Will this fix the loop issue? If this is too difficult to discuss in comments like this, we can maybe chat about it at the next meet up.
Sort of...
It is a bit complicated to discuss here, I'm happy to help you sometime before the next meetup, if you'd like to talk via Skype/phone.
Essentially, we'd have to see what your host did to the .htaccess file before we know what the next step is. It's not a file I can see without access to your server.
That being said, things seem to running very smoothly on your site right now. Clean URLs are working, images are loading, etc. I see you have CSS/JS aggregation on, and you're getting a fairly high Page Speed score (89). I'd say you're doing really well.
The only thing I feel bad about is your trouble with the Date/Calendar module. The modules definitely work, as I have them running on some development sites, but they are a bit finicky right now. Maybe that's something we can troubleshoot at a meetup.
-Scott
Scott Rouse
http://about.me/scott.rouse
Actually I'd like in on that meetup!
I am having errors on CoWorking Montana with the date/calendar modules. It may be a simple 'switch' thingy but I see a lot of others having selector issues on the Calendar thread.
I ensured I had clean installs (and many Cron's, Update.php's and went step by step with the video tute's) and I too (from the error thread) am missing a selector (Date: Date-to) and my 'Events'' disappear with all the other content off the Calendar. In fact the base Calendar URL repopulates to calendar/may2011 or something like that and the 'view' on Calendar only shows a teaser line of year | month | week | day The calendar (grid) view went bye-bye.
Odd indeed.
Jelly meetup?
Okay...
When I used your original Bitterroot-2 link, that was the issue. Now using the straight forward : http://www.bitterrootpubliclibrary.org/ it all seems just fine.
As to page speed, et al:
-Go here if you use Firefox and download the add on. http://getfirebug.com/downloads Install this first.
-Then go here for Page Speed. http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/ install this now.
You can go to the downloads page link at the bottom but I wanted you to see the resources.
-You will need to restart Firefox once or twice along the way.
-Then open Firebug (there may be a little bug icon in your sys tray (far right-bottom) of your browser now or go to
(In your FF browser) Tools>Firebug>open firebug
-On the far right of the new drop 'up' window you will see Page Speed and then click the analyze button. You will get a results page that has links to items one can address. Firebug has all kinds of great tools to help the developer, have fun!
OOpsss...
I replied before I received notice of Scott's post.
Yes he is absolutely on target. One can enable the compression on one's site. The scores I saw after running Page Speed indicated that perhaps you 'may' have done that so I didn't mention it. Thanks Scott!
To get to those settings, once you are logged in as Admin then add admin/config/development/performance to your URL or dig down through the Admin menu to Configuration>Development block>performance and you will see the check boxes that Scott mentioned above.
A word of caution (since this happened once or twice to me) to clear cache and make sure there aren't any errors on the site. One host was running one of my sites through something other than Apache and after I flipped the compression switches...I can't spell the noise I heard in my head when errors came flying up but you get the idea...
If all is well, then you are done. If not, then go back in and undo the check boxes until you can work out the issues.
Also when those check boxes (compression, et al) are on some of the changes you will make on the site may not appear right away. Before you go and freak out, try going to Performance (under Configuration in your Admin menu) and click Clear All Caches then check your handy work.