[support] Tips & Tricks while taking over a website

[Afan Pasalic]

As I mentioned in my previous email, money is not an issue. Though, I have to be sure (and assure the “employer”) I can “handle” their site or re-do is the only option. And that would be bad solution.

So, I’m trying to figure it out…

Thanks.


On Apr 24, 2014, at 10:24 PM, Hummel, Tracey S - (thummel) <thummel at email.arizona.edu> wrote:

> 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
> 
> ________________________________________
> 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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