A Fresher New Look
It's been quite a while since there was a major overhaul of the Cooler Crew Site. The time has come for one. The software we've been running on, Drupal 7, was originally planned to go end of life several years ago, before the Covid pandemic, in fact. Even before the pandemic struck, the maintainers had pushed that end of life date off into the future, but the pandemic hadthem continuing to push it forward.
Its immediate successor, Drupal 8, was first released on November 19, 2015. This upgrade represented a major architectural change to both the software and the upgrade process. Unlike the upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, which was comparatively simple, upgrading from 7 to 8 was, rather than being an in-place upgrade, going to be a migration. Content on the site would end up broken into smaller and smaller pieces for storage, and each piece of code was expected to perform its own migration. Given that the "important" content on this site is the supply of treasure hunt information, and I wrote a lot of code to enable all of the treasure hunt pieces, writing these migrations was not a trivial task, and so, as the end of life date kept getting pushed off, I also continued to push off the migration process.
In June of 2021, was the pandemic was winding down, the Drupal organization announced that Drupal 8 was being deprecated (it went EOL on November 2, 2021). Its own successor, Drupal 9, had been released on June 3, 2020, and it represented a potentially breaking change to how site configuration was managed. Drupal 9 reached the end of its life cycle on November 1, 2023, having been maintained alongside of Drupal 10 since its release on November 15, 2022. And oh yeah, the Drupal organization announced that the end of life to the software we've been using will be a non-negotiable, non-extendable January 5, 2025.
So now, we had a jump from across 3 versions of the underlying software. Fortunately, I had started to write the migration code late in the Drupal 9 release cycle, so only minor changes were needed to move it to the current version of the Drupal. After a few test runs earlier on, and a couple more since the wind-down of the Winter 2024 treasure hunting season, I got to thinking that the only thing I had left was to make the site under Drupal 10 look as close as I could to the way it looked under Drupal 7. Fortunately making cosmetic changes to a web site is much simpler than making data structure changes, so after getting it "good enough" I decided to pull the trigger and make the changes.
The result is what you see here. As I write this there are 3,826 pages on this site, that consist of treasure hunts, blog posts, newspaper articles, forums, and various other pieces of information. The underlying data has migrated over successfully. I took advantage of the migration process to make the hundreds of photo slide shows from various newspaper articles properly functional. But doing that means that there's a lot of content that I need to touch in order to make them fit the mold. 3,826, of them to be exact.
I also made changes to how the various treasure hunts are organized, internally anyway. These changes made pages for the approximately 200 different treasure hunt types obsolete. Part of this process of touching each of those pages involves unpublishing them, so that I can repurpose the nodes (Drupal-speak for a piece of content) within the site for other uses. I don't like having gaps in the database for the node sequence numbers. This page, in fact, is taking the place of the page that formerly listed the Allison Wonderland Mock Hunt page. That part involves some database changes on my part, just to keep things clean.
I'm about 626 pages into the whole process, out of 3,826. I've got a bit to go. But its going rather quickly. Until its done, there are certain things that may not work as well as I'd like. The menu items may not work. Treasure Hunt lists may not populate, but if there's something you're specifically looking for, you can always hit the search button in the top right corner of the site to look for it. As the guy who brings in most of the content in the site, I have to say I rather enjoy the tools that are behind the scenes for editing pages. And going forward moving to a new version of Drupal should be a lot easier for me. Hopefully you won't even notice it.
Hopefully I'll be done touching everything that needs to be touched before the Summer hunting season kicks off. I've got a few that I want to find this year, and all I want to do here is copy clues into the respective pages.
Because now that Drupal 10 has been released and available for 15 or so months, I'm going to have to get ready for Drupal 11's planned release in early December.
I'll let you know with another post when I'm done messing with the content. It will be soon. Until then, I probably know about things that may be problematic for you, so there's no need right now anyway to let me know if you see a problem.
And always remember:
Coolerheads will prevail!
