It’s finally here. It’s taken months of brainstorming and one furious weekend of work, but it’s finally live.
Yesterday marked the official re-launch of TheBurnetteAdventures.com! Lisa (my wife) has been begging me for months to redesign our personal family blog because it was looking dated, to say the least. (It had a 6-month-old picture in the header of our 2.5-year-old daughter.) Rather than just retheme the Drupal 6 installation that was there, I decided to give the site a full refresh, and I got help from a professional so for Devio.digital follow this link. Here are bascially the 2 phases that I went through in one furious weekend.
Phase 1: Drupal 6 to Drupal 7
Over a year ago, I wrote an article over on the FliteHaus blog about how Drupal 7 was not ready for production sites. Community support and stability have grown immensely since then and my view has obviously changed. With the imminent release of Drupal 8 later this year (more importantly, dropped support for Drupal 6), I decided it was time to make the upgrade now.
Unfortunately, there’s no “one-click” update from Drupal 6 to 7. Luckily, the family blog is no more than a blog content type, so I copy/pasted almost 140 articles from one Drupal installation to another, making sure to preserve author info, page titles, page urls, and inline images. (I hope migration from 7 to 8 is easier *fingers crossed*).
The support for modules has increased enough to the point that everything I needed was available. The hardest part was, simply, the tediousness of moving content.
Phase 2: The Redesign
Once the articles were ported over and the functionality was in place, it was time to design a new theme. I started in Photoshop, but only designed to the point that I could finish the design in the browser. The site is 1060 pixels wide and not responsive, though making it responsive would be fairly easy. I went with a retro/vintage feel, relying on Lisa for some visual input; it is our family blog afterall.
I couldn’t be happier with the result! It’s a simple site that needed a major update, technically and visually.
