Lessons learned in changing the CMS

Written by Chintan Rajyaguru

Sunday, 23 April 2006 13:36

What makes IT challenging and interesting? Its unpredictability and inconsistency. Any one who has ever written code, knows that sometime the application stops working all of a sudden - without any warning or apparent reason!

I went through a similar experience a couple of days ago. I went to my website, http://chintanrajyaguru.com and I was welcomed by a blank page. Initially, I thought my site was down, then I thought the index.php page had some errors. I am not a PHP expert so I couldn't find anything wrong with the page but it 'looked' okay.

"It's alright!" I thought in my mind, "I was considering moving to a different CMS anyway (look for another blog entry on this shortly)." But how do I migrate content from mambo to my new CMS? I didn't know how mambo stored the content in mysql database, nor did I have time or intention to find out. So, I decided to copy and paste the content.

This is where the reality struck! I DIDN'T HAVE ANY CONTENT! My website was down and I hadn't backed up anything - ever! A HUGE mistake! The power of Google helped overcome the stupidity. I went to www.google.com and searched my name, pulled out cached pages and copied content from there, including images. Fortunately, I knew exactly what content items were missing so simple Google searches like "chintanrajyaguru Linux installation adventure" worked well.

The lesson learned? Take backups. Take backups and take more backups. Here are some more ideas:

Taking backup could be as simple as always administering the website from one machine and keeping copies of everything locally
Take regular backups of the CMS database (this involves some learning but it's worth it as the website grows in content). If CMS changes, the database might not be very useful
Some CMS systems support syndication. It might be a good idea to maintain a local installation of the website and syndicate content to it on regular basis. I have never tried syndication before so I don't know how it works. Plus, this involves maintaining a local installation of your environment (Linux, mysql, your CMS and more), which might be an overcall for some
Finally, provide links to various content items on the website, hit the website from Google. This way Google will keep the cache in case the history repeats itself

Here are a few things CMS systems could do:

Provide some kind of backup utility. Most CMS probably do provide some sort of backup feature but this may require some technical skills that every one may not have or may not want to spend time learning
Allow users to reset the website to its original settings. The whole point of having CMS is to separate content and its presentation. If something goes wrong, it should be possible to recover the presentation without affecting the content

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