After reading 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website from Smashing Magazine. I have decided to write my blog post on extra things you should be aware of when launching your new drupal site. This is assuming you have a development site on another server somewhere. Think of this as a checklist when launching.
1. Site Information
Under admin/settings/site-information make sure the E-mail address and site name is changed to the new live site's name instead of dev.
2. Cron Setup
This can be done in various ways. Installing Poormanscron or just having your web host hit cron.php or set it up yourself on your server.
3. Clear out Cache tables and Watchdog
I would suggest clearing all the cache tables drupal provides, such as cache_page. Another table to clean out is the watchdog so that your new errors will show instead of looking at all your dev errors.
4. Rebuild modules and menu
Just navigate to admin/build/menu and admin/build/modules
5. Favicon
This is normally by default working but there are cases where you specify the favicon to be custom location. To make sure they are using the correct one, you can navigate to admin/build/themes/settings/[theme_name].
6. Imagecache Issues
This module sometimes does not work after a server move. You should test by creating dummy content with image fields. If the image does not appear, check if the file permissions is correctly setup on your server. Secondly check if the imagecache presets work in certain areas after a new image is uploaded. Problems such as GD library not supported etc. can all issues that can cause these problems. I strongly suggest unchecking the module and reinstalling it. After that flush out the images and even check the tables filepaths.
7. Files are not showing correctly
Check admin/settings/file-system to see if your file system path has changed.
8. Links
Your hardcoded links that go to your development site are not suppose to be there. Proof read and next time write better code for your urls. Drupal has functions such as url('node/1') or l('Hello', 'node/1') that help you get your links right.
9. GMap API keys, Google Analytics code, and other tracking API keys
These all need to be taken care of, you do not want to use the same ones as your development server as they may not work or give you incorrect statistics.
10. Disable Development modules
These modules include all the imagecache_ui, views_ui, etc. This cleans out the system and prevents some potential client destruction. You can do this manually or navigate to admin_menu/toggle-modules
Comments
Thanks for these tips!
- check the roles, permissions and users
- check the status report for any problems
- backup the website when everything is done.
:)
Great tips!
cleaning out cache tables and watchdog. I wouldn't just dump the entire DB from dev to production.
I'd dump all tables (data + structure) except cache and watchdog. Finally, I'd copy only the structure of those tables to the live version.
Or, if you don't have any further use for logs and cache, just empty those tables out on your development version before moving the database to your production server.
Just try to avoid moving unnecessary data alltogether. Especially on large projects where a db can weigh in over several 10's of Mb's.
Another tip I would like to add is to check if you have the latest Drupal core version, and that the contributed modules are up to date. The Status Update module will tell you this but it's not a required module. It happens frequently that during the development of a Drupal site a couple of security issues get fixed or that module owners release new version of their modules. It's worth double checking this before you launch your site.
Few More things
- Enable Cache for good performance
- Optimize JavaScript and style sheet file from performance
- Title and meta data checking
- Check User Setting for registration and email notes.
- Check clean URL if enable.
- Backup website when everything is done.
11. Make sure your user 1 password is something very secure. ;-)
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