I am going to delve into learning to program. I’ll start by attempting to fix one of our websites, or rather updating the drupal releases on all of them to the latest releases. This always causes me a lot of anxiety, as I have deleted things in the past, including databases, and therefore entire websites.
I learned Visual Basic a long, long time ago in a college class. When I met my partner, he introduced me to Claris Home Page and we built websites using that program. I discovered w3schools and learned a bit of html and saw that the html Claris Home Page created wasn’t as clean as that mentioned in the w3schools tutorials. Around that time I went to a mashupcamp/ barcamp. I migrated to using drupal for our websites based on the recommendation of someone there.
That’s when I felt I stopped developing as a potential developer. I didn’t know anything about php and I still don't know php . It’s like I can read the language, but not understand what it means. I feel the same way about CSS. I dabbled with some tutorials, but I haven’t really built anything.
Whenever I have to do web development, or rather website troubleshooting on these drupal sites, or any sites that were created with my partner, I get anxious. I postpone any work until absolutely necessary. I know this is not the approach I should take, I’ve let anxiety take over.
At the same time, I have a romantic vision of web development and technology in general. I believe technology can solve many of the social ills in the world and I want to be part of that change. So, I need to take a deep breath and dive in. This time. I am going to try to do a better job of documenting my work, including how I feel so I can return to this in the future.
Alright, so the problem is that I need to upload/ upgrade to the latest release of Drupal for our websites. The current model is 8 and I need to migrate to 9. I know this will be a bigger job.
Downloaded drupal-9.0.2.zip from drupal website
First, I should back everything up… Logged into our webhost (which I hate, just saying- part of that is because I tried to learn Ruby on Rails and was really enjoying it and couldn’t deploy it on this cheap webhost-I stuck with the webhost and stopped learning Ruby on Rails- penny wise and pound foolish).
Went to actual domain/website and it appears to not have ANYTHING. “No front page content has been created yet…”
OK, this is strange. I need to find any content that was created, and maybe use this as an opportunity to move away from drupal, at least for this website.
I started looking for the foling that used to appear on their older dashboard. I think it’s because I go through a different registrar and use them for hosting only (again penny wise…).
I saw an ad for inMotion Hosting on Filezilla...I’ve also heard of netlify and Blue Host...I may definitely be looking for a new host. So frustrated!
Got the link I needed to the control panel. Figured out the folder to which the domain was pointing Had to Enable FTP in the webhost Created a very rudimentary basic index.html file Installed a new version of Filezilla When I connected through Filezilla- message- “This server does not support FTP over TLS - If you continue password and files will be sent in clear over the internet..” I’m not sure I want to do that… let’s try a different way.
Navigated to File Management in the webhost control panel. Deleted directory including all files. That was tricky, as I had to change permissions on some files. I ended up creating a new foder to which the domain is pointing. This is where my current webhost makes it really frustrating. I’.m having to go through chat support just to access the pointers and subdomains page- somethlder, uploaded the basic html file into the folder and pointed the domain to the folder.
Well the site is pointing to my rather pathetic index.html page, but at least I understand it, unlike drupal. This is a good start for today. I’ll start venturing in more tomorrow. Thanks for reading.
