During the last weeks at work I’ve been working on a very cool Mootools based Javascript API to interact with Kyte’s REST API. So far it’s been working very good and I’m very impressed about how fast Kyte’s API is.

Unfortunately, until the project I’m working on is launched I won’t be able to show any code. The launch date is April 27th :)

Last Saturday I decided to upgrade Spaniards.es to Drupal 6. I’ve been waiting for a long time, since Drupal 6 came out, basically because this site uses a lot of modules which weren’t available yet for the new version. Recently drupal.org was also upgraded and that was a decisive point for me.

It took me five hours to upgrade, but most of the process was making sure I had good backups copied on both servers but also downloaded to my personal computer. It takes a while to download a site like this!

Here is my log:

1. Set Site Maintenance
2. Set .htaccess maintenance redirect
3. Stop MYSQL
4. Backup spdba_main
5. Backup public_html
6. Rename public_html to public_html_5.15
7. Create sym link to public_html: ln -s public_html_5.15 public_html
8. Grab list of active modules select filename, status from system where filename like '%.module' and status = 1;
9. Disable all non-core modules
10. Download Drupal 6.9
11. Delete sym link rm public_html
12. Create sym link to Drupal 6 ln -s drupal-6.9 public_html
13. Copy default.settings.php to settings.php
14. Update DB connection string
15. Process to upgrade Drupal: www.spaniards.es/update.php

Once the DB was updated, it was a matter of installing all the modules and upgrading the DB when needed. Most of the staff worked fine. I had to do some fixes on my custom modules, specially for the new menu hooks.

Drupal 6 rocks.

vancode2int is a very simple but nice function I was looking for for a while and I had no idea Drupal included. It basically decodes the thread id of a comment in Drupal converting it back to an integer, which is very useful when displaying comments on a plain list, instead of on a threaded conversation tree.