Scheduled Maintenance and Site Upgrade

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#1 Mon, 10/05/2015 - 01:21
Joe
Joe's picture

Scheduled Maintenance and Site Upgrade

Howdy all,

If all goes according to plan, over the next couple of evenings (Monday and Tuesday beginning at 6PM central time and lasting until early the next morning), there will be some short-term site unavailability, as we migrate and upgrade the Virtualmin.com website to a new version of Drupal, a different shopping cart, and a new license manager.

So, during those times the site will occasionally be in read only mode, or will be completely off-line. This will effect the website at virtualmin.com, including the shopping cart, license manager UI and API, forums, and support tracker.

The software.virtualmin.com software repository server will not be affected, and will be up and running through the whole process.

Likewise, we will still receive email sent to @virtualmin.com addresses throughout the process (with a short delay in mail receipt during the DNS changes).

In short: If you need to buy, upgrade, or renew, Virtualmin or Cloudmin on Monday or Tuesday, do it early in the day, or save it for the next day.

The good news is that we'll finally be running version 7 of Drupal (we're currently on Drupal 6), sometime this coming week. It improves a number of things we've all had complaints about with the current site, particularly with regard to the shopping experience, but it also improves the ticket tracker, forums, and performance (we hope, though it's certainly faster on the development server).

Regards,

Joe

Wed, 10/07/2015 - 01:44
Joe
Joe's picture

So, this didn't happen just yet. I ended up needing to switch our payment processor in order to handle some new features for the license manager/shopping cart I've been wanting to implement for years. So, it's delayed things a little bit. Will likely be flipping the switch in a couple more days.

--

Check out the forum guidelines!

Sat, 10/17/2015 - 16:44
Diabolico
Diabolico's picture

This means new price models?

- I often come to the conclusion that my brain has too many tabs open. -
Failing at desktop publishing & graphic design since 1994.

Mon, 10/19/2015 - 10:26
andreychek

Howdy,

While I can't get into specifics ATM, we are looking to tweak some things regarding pricing and payment that we think will be for the better. This will include options people have been asking about for quite awhile!

Those would indeed go into effect once the new site is online.

-Eric

Mon, 10/19/2015 - 20:13
Diabolico
Diabolico's picture

What about forum? Can we get some normal forum software? This kind of forum its hard to navigate, sometimes not easy to post, in few pages long topic new reply can be posted anywhere, we need report button, we need a cleanup from people posting in several parts of the forum or just hijacking other topics...

Or you could lock this forum so it can stay as some sort of historical data and switch to new one? To be honest this is worst forum (software) i saw in last few years.

- I often come to the conclusion that my brain has too many tabs open. -
Failing at desktop publishing & graphic design since 1994.

Tue, 10/20/2015 - 09:59
andreychek

Howdy,

The site is moving to Drupal 7 (the current one is on 6).

That will upgrade the Forums as well.

That brings a number of improvements with it, along with more modules we can use to customize things.

I definitely agree, there are plenty of things about this version that are far from ideal.

Give the new version a try when it's out (soon), if you see things you don't like, let us know and we'll see what we can do to fix it.

-Eric

Tue, 10/20/2015 - 18:59
Diabolico
Diabolico's picture

I would rather see a dedicated forum software, paid or free, than what i saw on other Drupal websites. Quick check on google show a plenty of ways how to integrate different forum software with Drupal maybe is worth to think about that.

- I often come to the conclusion that my brain has too many tabs open. -
Failing at desktop publishing & graphic design since 1994.

Mon, 11/16/2015 - 09:22
fuerst

Even as Drupal developer I can warmly recommend http://www.discourse.org. It is nice to use for end users, and easy to maintain as Docker container. It has Drupal integration (content, SSO) too: https://www.drupal.org/project/discourse.

Mon, 11/16/2015 - 11:14
andreychek

Howdy,

Once Joe is able to get the new Drupal 7 site online (which should be soon, hopefully), we'll see what everyone thinks of those Forums. Depending on what folks think, Discourse is definitely in the cards.

The fact that it integrates well with Drupal is excellent, having SSO is super-cool! :-)

-Eric

Tue, 11/17/2015 - 16:34
mandresen

Based on the comments in this thread and elsewhere about site upgrade, and possibly larger changes in VirtualMin, should one hold off on performing a server migration of a VirtualMin Pro server in the coming week?

Are there any changes likely to create additional hassle versus just getting my migration over with?

Best wishes, Morten

Tue, 11/17/2015 - 17:28 (Reply to #10)
andreychek

Nope, you shouldn't see any problems whatsoever with your server or Virtualmin installation.

Joe was just posting that here because during the time he's doing the migration, the virtualmin.com site may be offline. That affects things like support queries and forum usage and such. But he's also planning it for non-peak hours, so we're hoping it will largely go unnoticed :-)

-Eric

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