Gallery2 Migration
I’m still in the process of moving our web site to a new hosting provider. I wanted to keep my photo gallery pages intact, but to do so I need to migrate the database and all of the image files to their new home. Getting the Gallery2 software updated on the old site was like pulling teeth, however, thanks to the world’s least supportive technical support team.
For some reason, it took them a whole week to run a single “chmod -r” command. A whole week to do something that should have taken five minutes! The Gallery practically updates itself, all you have to do is ensure that the data directory is writable by the update script. Well, mine wasn’t. All permissions were 644 — safe and secure, but the script wanted 777 across the board. The technical support people first refused to do it, then escalated the task to their admins, then ran the code non-recursively, and finally got it right on the fourth try.
The fun part came once the permissions issue was resolved: I had to update the version of Gallery2 on both sites, clear out the caches on both sites, then back up the MySQL database in the old instance and reload it into the new instance. Several bits of trial and error later, the new site had a working database that properly linked all of the files. Once it was running, I was amazed with myself. I was afraid that I would have to go back and reload each photo gallery manually, which would have messed up all of the image ID numbers.
To finish things up, I then set up a redirect on the new server that would send all of the old gallery links to the new gallery instead. This would keep me from having to update every image link that I’ve ever set. Now that the photo galleries are done, I just need to add some photos to the static web pages and then we’ll be done.
Recent Comments