Another Month Down

It’s been a while since the last post, and much has happened. I’m at this point in time intending to post more about that stuff tomorrow (April 10), because I’m pretty much using this post for some other testing purposes.

Upgrades, Upgrades…

A new TWiki release had been made not long ago, and a serious patch was released within the last week or so. As I’d not yet upgraded to the latest version (I did an interim upgrade last fall, sometime in late October if I recall), I thought this weekend would be a good time to take two semi-public TWiki installations and bring them up to date.

One went fairly smoothly, aside from the fact that I had to do two updates…which just takes time. It’s better than it used to be, but the first (easier) still took a few hours to complete and test out.

Having gotten the first one done without much trouble, I decided to tackle the much larger mzonline.com installation (this one). There are several things I’ve manually configured and added, along with other items (such as plugins) which make this a more intense upgrade. Fortunately, I only had to do one upgrade, though, since I’d done the other one last fall.

So, I started in and things went pretty well…until I made it go “live” (thus replacing the old installation). Software error. So, after disabling some things, I managed to get that working without any problems — at least it was serving content properly (even if in a crippled sort of way). Well, long story short, the plugins I’d previously installed didn’t come over to the new version very well. This was mostly (in fact, almost completely) related to the fact I had to install special CPAN Perl modules to make these things work (specifically for the calendar thing).

I had fought with these installations in the past, but I got it hacked together and it had been working. Unfortunately, the way search paths and stuff are configured in the latest version of TWiki, my previous installation/hack was no longer working properly, and that’s what was causing the plugins to malfunction.

Several hours later, I was still not much closer to a solution.

So, I gave up on it last night and left the plugins in question disabled. This caused no strange behavior except that the expansion code (the special stuff I put in a page which renders a calendar, for instance) was displayed to the user instead of a calendar.

I decided to tackle the problem again today, and I’m happy to report that after a few more hours of tinkering and whatnot, I’ve completed the entire upgrade process. I ended up reinstalling the CPAN modules into a newer (and easier to use) library path which the TWiki installation uses by default. This took care of part of the problem. I then downloaded and installed new copies of the plugins in question, then made small modifications as necessary to reflect previous changes I’d made for my own use.

Things were working well, so I made the final template changes and removed all of the old (archive) data once I was sufficiently convinced that the upgrade itself would work and I’d not have to revert to the old installation. I also removed the old Perl libraries I’d previously installed, because these were now duplicates and no longer in use.

As of right now, I had to make a few additional changes (it’s good to come back and try stuff again after a few hours and cleaned cache), but things seem to still be working properly. So, hopefully as I get some time, I’ll be able to play around with some new features and see what else I can do with this thing.

Anyway, it’s nearly midnight, so I’m heading for bed. I will hopefully get another post out tomorrow about things which have transpired in the last month!

Until then…

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/29/07