[support] Tips & Tricks while taking over a website

[Hummel, Tracey S - (thummel)]

No documentation AND they did not remove unused modules??  Nice.  

I'd tack on $$$ for lack of documentation and then give them back good documentation.  I can't imagine not having any documentation on a very complex site.   I can't count how many times my docs have saved me. 

IMO, documentation is sharing.  A company using an open source, community-built package might want to share more love.... 

Tracey

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From: support-bounces at drupal.org [support-bounces at drupal.org] on behalf of Jamie Holly [hovercrafter at earthlink.net]
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2014 7:58 PM
To: support at drupal.org
Subject: Re: [support] Tips & Tricks while taking over a website

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. 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.

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.

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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