The time of being consumed by the ADF website is slowly coming to an end.  Since my last post, we have looked at every page on the website, fixed most of the broken links, and fixed errors in the code that were found.  Cosmetic issues were also handled to make it look and feel the same as what we have currently.  The biggest thing was the mobile responsive theme that now makes it easier to use on a phone, which is amazingly where I use it the most.

So what has changed?  A lot, but almost entirely behind the scenes.  The biggest part of the work was upgrading the custom code.  This was thousands of lines that were gone through and brought into line with the upgraded back end software.  Other changes included doing some things that made the programming more efficient and fewer database calls overall meaning that for some parts of the website we should see some improved performance.

As of this morning, we have reached the final stages of testing.  The website has been copied to a staging area, and thankfully very few errors occurred, all of them were expected.  The main, live website has been frozen with edit rights removed from almost everyone... No more moving target to hit as far as content goes.  The leaders of ADF were asked to take a look at the development site to see any issues that the webmasters didn't catch... There are literally hundreds of permissions per role, over 60 roles, and hundreds of options per content type, over 60 types.... All are check boxes that could not be migrated.  So while all were checked and double checked, there is room for something to have gone wrong.

At this point I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it does not look like it is a train.  If things go as planned, I should be able to do the last file move next weekend and have the site upgraded at last.  Of course this is not the end... A new major version was released a couple months ago, and some of the programming has changed yet again... Some moving from php to yaml as one example.  This will make the custom code both easier and more complex, but it is worth it.  They also have helper scripts to help upgrade stuff... So that is one project that needs to be started.  We also have some features that have been requested that we need to incorporate.  There has also been a request to make a much less extensive public side that would be flashy, but no direction on this has been given to us to date.... We have projects to do, but the biggest one is almost over, and I can soon not spend all night and all weekend with a laptop on my lap.