[support] Tips & Tricks while taking over a website

[Afan Pasalic]

On Apr 24, 2014, at 9:58 PM, Jamie Holly <hovercrafter at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Sadly there isn't an easy way. Depending on my first views of the site, 
> I'll quote the company the time to "learn" what was done by the other 
> shop. I'll try to get them and the shop I'm taking over from on a call 
> to work out the details, but have been in the situation where the terms 
> that they left the other shop wasn't great.
It’a gonna be long term contract so time=money is not an issue. :)

> Generally I can get an 
> overall idea of what is going on in about an hour, just seeing what 
> modules they have, what views, rules, contexts, fields and content types 
> there are and clicking through the admin section.
This is actually main point of my question. Any “Tips & Tricks”?
There is big number of modules installed but not active so it confuses me. Like, Acquia Network Connector - none of three modules is on. Views is on but I can’t see any view page/block created - that means the layout is defined by custom modules not by Views?

> 
> One other thing I always do early on is run the hacked module:
> 
> https://drupal.org/project/hacked
> 
> It's great to detect if the shop you took over from did any changes to 
> core on contrib. If I find any, then I inform the client of it and let 
> them know that upgrades won't be as easy and incur extra costs, unless I 
> can figure out a way to undo what they did without the need for hacking.
> 
> Another big thing to check for is any nodes running PHP code. You can do 
> that by querying the different field tables that have the PHP formatter 
> on (if the module is involved). In my experience the biggest surprises 
> come from nodes executing PHP code.
> 
PHP filer core module is  off - does it mean there is no php code in nodes?

Thanks


> Jamie Holly
> http://hollyit.net
> 
> On 4/24/2014 9:48 PM, Afan Pasalic wrote:
>> I got a D7 website to take care of. Since the website is still "in charge" of the old/current/outside web development company, I don’t want to do anything on the production website to avoid any possible conflict with the web development company.
>> I installed copy of the website on my localhost and trying to figure it out what they were doing. The website is rather complex with tons of content types, webforms and custom modules.
>> Anybody already had exact or similar experience with taking over a website? Any tips and trick would be appreciated.
>> 
>> Thanks for any help.
> 
> -- 
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