Contrib modules used (and for what)

"Contrib" modules are modules that are not part of Drupal "core" and have to be downloaded & installed separately. They can be found in sites/all/modules/.

• Administration menu - this puts a more convenient menu across the top of the screen. Disabled right now because the last update didn't work right.
•  LDAP integration - lets people login using their regular UW user ID and password. one of the limitations with this is that when people write posts it only comes up under their username (e.g. stewart or sforgrav). The real name module could be a solution to this. The ldap data module should be able to pull in everyone's real name from ldap.
• Better formats - can't remember why I needed this...
• Custom module - modifies the content form to leave the name field blank by default (rather than Anonymous) and removes option for ldap users to edit their name in their profile (not sure if that works or not).
• FCKeditor - WYSIWYG editor; currently set up to be available for admins & authors only. 
• IMCE - not sure if this ever got hooked up right; was to be used to handle image uploads
• Mollom - automatic spam-filtering tool (like akismet)
• Pathauto - creates nice URLs
• Scheduler - allows you to schedule a post to be published/unpublished at certain dates & times
• Secure pages - enables LDAP authentications to go through ssl
• Token - dependency of various other modules
• Webform - create forms without programming; has been used for various WAC and redesign-related surveys. 
• Read more tweak - customizes the read more links to be more obvious to users.
• Google Analytics - enables data collection by GA
• Views - views basically does database queries. It's used for:
  • firstthree - view of the 3 most recent stories, used for the home page 
  • recent_drafts - I just made this block to get easier access to recent drafts. Shown as a block on admin pages to admin users only.
  •  recent_posts_minus3 - shows the recent stories minus the first three; shown on the home page under the teasers for the first three stories.
  •  redesign_RSS is an RSS feed for all stories in the redesign category; resources_RSS is an RSS for all weblinks
  • showbooks - lists all books, used for documentation main page is a view of all books (assumes that books are only used for documentation)
  • the rest of the views listed are defaults (they come with Views) 
• Weblink - handles the resources section
   

Some annoying issues

• LDAP Authentication & secure login - we don't have a security certificate for web.uwaterloo, so any secure processes need to go from the server root (strobe). A few things might be broken when navigating the site after logging in (e.g. any links or images referenced by relative paths; better to keep these as relative to avoid future breakage, and put up with the problem when logged in. This is a bigger problem when inserting images with FCKeditor)
  
    Certain people may also complain that they're getting security warnings from the images in the theme referencing a non-secure domain. I tried fixing this but didn't come up with a solution because the same theme is used for both secure and non-secure versions of the site. 
• login destination - when you log in using the login link at the bottom you go to your account page, not the page you were on before. If you use the login block instead, it does direct you to where you were. Showing the login block on this site isn't the best idea since most users won't need to log in. The alternative would be to sort of hide/show it... I tried the login destination module but wasn't able to get it to work. Maybe that should be revisited.
• FCKeditor seems to be breaking the back button. Could check bug reports on this...

Upgrading Drupal (minor version updates)

Drupal will show you a big red/pink warning message when there are security warnings available. These should be done ASAP. Yellow updates aren't security problems and can therefore be left until a convenient time. 

Upgrades should be tested on the Pole server first (unless very minor). The pole version right now is kind of a mess...

1. Check the release notes linked on the available updates page
2. Back up the database (export from phpmyadmin is fine
3. Follow my instructions to install updates using ssh & wget (probably more convenient than downloading & extracting otherwise)
4. The drupal download will extract into it's own folder. Copy the contents of this overtop of the main directory (cp -rf * ../)
5. Log in to the site as the root user (in this case the "admin" account)
6. Go to https://strobe.uwaterloo.ca/cpadev/web/update.php and follow the instructions
    

More instructions are available at drupal.org or in the upgrade.txt file.

Upgrading modules follows basically the same process, just download them to sites/all/modules instead.

These instructions apply to minor version upgrades only (e.g. 6.14 to 6.15). More co-ordination and testing will need to be done when upgrading to v. 7.

It is also possible to just check everything out of CVS.

Upgrading FCK Editor

The settings for the FCKeditor toolbars are in a config file in the FCKeditor module folder. Yes, it's annoying. When you run an upgrade you have to make sure that it doesn't overwrite our custom toolbars in the existing config file. I have created a backup of the config file (fckeditor.config.js.bak) that contains the original settings. After upgrading, copy this .bak file over the existing fckeditor.config file.