Website Platform Discussion

[John Ralls]

> On Jun 16, 2017, at 8:30 AM, Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jun 16, 2017, at 2:47 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
>> 
>> My (limited) experience is with drupal as well.
>> 
>> Regarding your first question (how to map version management on a cms driven 
>> website): usually only the cms code, modules and themes are version managed. 
>> The data resides in a database which is not well suited for version 
>> management. So code, module and theme updates would be done in much the same 
>> way as is done for the current website. One clones the git repository holding 
>> all the website code, make changes, create a PR/push upstream. The only 
>> additional step would be to run db updates right after this. Perhaps even that 
>> could be scripted.
>> The actual content needs something else, just like we need something else for 
>> our wiki pages. Both mediawiki (for our wiki pages) and drupal support "page 
>> revisions". So just as in the wiki we could follow the history of changes made 
>> to each page.
>> 
>> A side effect of the content being in a db rather than in git is it is no 
>> longer stored in a distributed way. So it will be important to implement a 
>> backup plan for the data.
> 
> The site host should provide a facility for this either through cPanel/Plex, or you can set a cron job via SSH. Many have options to schedule backups to an offsite FTP server.
> 
> You’d need to regularly back up both the db and the site structure.

Adrien,

Our “hosting provider” is Linas Vepstas, one of the original developers of GnuCash, on a machine at his home. There is no CPanel or Plex interface and AFAIK nobody has remote shell access to it. OTOH he knows how to set up backups, we'll just need to tell him what to back up. An obvious offsite location would be code.gnucash.org hosted at Derek Atkins’s house, which is where the wiki and canonical git repositories live. 

Regards,
John Ralls