[support] Multiple site update and maintenance D6

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:05:24 +0000
Earnie Boyd <earnie at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> Crontab comes to mind using wget similar to cron.php.

Yep you're right... if I've dev and prod sites and:
- I want to svn without worries... I can't save stuf related to the
  environment in drupal cfg
- on the other hand the difference of environment is going to be the
  server name

meanwhile I ran into other problems... and I'm thinking at what chx
was proposing about sqlite.

Somehow drupal configuration and environment is not that definite.

You can't just eg. put it in a complex object, save it somewhere and
substitute it with another one.

What I mean... you can't eg. bootstrap, save the configuration
somewhere, change db connection, re-bootstrap, save the
configuration in some other place... and then re-bootstrap and load
a "personality" on the fly.

As a concrete example I tried to build up a minimum
static "configuration" to run my scripts on a multisite.

Everything was working till I had to switch the theme.

Here I'm on D5.

Switching a theme on the fly doesn't look even possible.
Functions to load the theme dynamically include files and the naming
conventions let people give clashing names in the themes so you end
up in "function already defined" errors.
Fortunately I can move part of the code I really need somewhere else
but then I'll have to write some logic that decide which function to
call according to a configuration parameter that's going to be a
drupal variable that will introduce a dependency on the DB
connection.
One way would be to make templates classes, they could still
dynamically include code but you could have several instances and
shelter them in a namespace.
Even the configuration could fit in a class, with a constructor that
get a DB connection, so 2 configurations may share a connection, you
could run the drupal code base switching between 2 configuration
dynamically etc...

> Or perhaps a master control Drupal instance where the $db_url is
> an array of each sites DB.  Then you can run your foreach
> specifying each DB with db_set_active.

I know my situation is peculiar and I'm actually "scratching my own
itch" but if you're sharing the DB across a multisite it's a pain to
change connection.
The theme system is actually a "good" example.
If you've some complicated logic you'd like to simply switch and you
don't want to play the glue game by yourself
call_user_func($somestuff .'_somepostfix', $args);
themes are a good candidate to change logic with just one switch...
and by chance... I was actually dealing with some sort of theming...
just not "directed" to the browser... but to xml.

So I'm thinking to play the glue game or maybe put this stuff in a
class and create 2 instances.


-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it