Forum OpenACS Q&A: Looking to relaunch an OpenACS 2003 backed up website???

1: Looking to relaunch an OpenACS 2003 backed up website???

Posted by Adam Yendole on 09/17/12 12:45 PM

Looking for advice and help about relaunching a website that was designed using OpenACS (version 4.5) by a web design agency in the UK in 2003. I have a back up disk containg all content but need to know what steps I need to take to get everything up and running again. I have tried reading through the OpenACS tutorial but unfortunately my web design knowledge is not great. Please could someone help me, maybe with a 'to do' list which I could pass on to a local web designer to help save them time with the relaunch. Cheers, Adam.

2: Re: Looking to relaunch an OpenACS 2003 backed up website??? (response to 1)

Posted by Jim Lynch on 09/17/12 07:05 PM

I think maybe the simplest way to start is to put it back up as a version 4.5. you have already the aolserver config file and either the database or a dump of it (latter case, just restore it), start it up and then fix any problems that come up.

As far as styling, the web designer needs to be made aware of the templating system and some additional tags available for the purpose of taking data from data sources and rendering it.

For the tags, look at http://your.server/doc/acs-templating and look at the designer guide.

If you wish to upgrade to the latest version of openacs, I would do this -far- away from the production server, maybe on a machine at home. You could either:

copy the old 4.5 site to a separate machine, then upgrade package-by-package, or
atart with a 5.7 plain, bare openacs and move your packages and customizations across.

Last time I did something like this, I used the second method.

3: Re: Looking to relaunch an OpenACS 2003 backed up website??? (response to 1)

Posted by Adam Yendole on 09/18/12 11:34 AM

Thanks so much for the quick reply Jim. I will pass all of your info on and hopefully the back up restore will run quickly and smoothly. Cheers again!

4: Re: Looking to relaunch an OpenACS 2003 backed up website??? (response to 1)

Posted by Jim Lynch on 09/19/12 07:53 PM

Welcome. If you don't have dumps (just the files managed by postgres), then you're going to want to start the same postgres version that was used when the site was running in 2003, and make a textual database dump.

Whenever I back up, I keep two things: (1) the complete set of files that is the service (incl. the aolserver config file and if applicable the "run" file that daemontools uses, and (2) the database dump file.