UPDATE 12/29/14: The Social Media Hat was down for approximately 3 hours while these upgrades were being applied. There are numerous adjustments and updates yet to be made, but there should be no more site downtime as we work to complete this project. Thank you for your understanding and patience!
Beginning at approximately 12:00am EST 12/29/13, The Social Media Hat will be undergoing a major upgrade and may be down or unavailable for brief periods of time.
Our apologies if you’re unable to access one or more articles or resources that you were looking for. Rest assured, all maintenance and construction will be completed in a timely manner.
Curious what’s going on?
Well, for starters, The Social Media Hat is getting a whole new look and feel! Eva, my wife and graphic designer, has created a beautiful design that we are in the process of preparing.
But at the same time, we’re also upgrading the entire platform on which The Social Media Hat is built: Drupal. The current site uses Drupal 6.x, but 7.x is the current version of Drupal Core. Upgrading a Drupal site from one core version to another is big deal. In order to proceed, we must:
- Disable all contributed modules.
- Place the site in Offline Mode.
- Upload the new version of Drupal and run the update script.
- Upload new versions of contributed modules and run the update script.
- Upload a new design programmed to work with Drupal 7.x and activate it.
- Test all essential functions.
- Take the site out of Offline Mode.
A flawless, errorless upgrade would take approximately two hours, but it’s likely there will be a number of issues to work through. So, we’ll see.
Our expectation is that by the end of the weekend, the site will be live and visitors will be able to resume access to all articles and resources. The next couple of days will be spent fine-tuning the new design and activiting a number of new features and functions that we’re really excited to have available as part of this upgrade. More on those when the new site is announced on 1/1/14.
In the meantime, thanks in advance for your patience and understanding. We’re really looking forward to the numerous ways these upgrades will benefit not only The Social Media Hat, but our readers, in the coming year.
Happy New Year!