blog | CreateSean Web Design

Merge two EE installs with MSM

Monday March 08 2010

I have two ExpressionEngine core sites that I would like to merge into one site using a personal license and the Multi Site Manager module. A few months ago I asked about how to do this on the forums, but it looks like it hasn’t been done before and everything needs to be manually done. I was hoping to find a better way, but so far no luck.

There are a couple of reasons I’m doing this. The primary reason is that EE core is being discontinued in the EE 2.0 branch and I don’t want to be left with outdated software. I know that EE 1.6.8 will be supported for some time, but eventually it will be dropped and I’d rather stay on top of things now. Additionally it looks like one of my favorite add-ons, Field Frame Matrix, which I use on both sites has moved from free to pay and using MSM will allow me to buy only one license—actually this is true of a couple of other add-ons that I want to use with both of these sites eventually.

At this point I have two sites, my personal family site which has entries going back to November 2002 and my new blog, Repatriate.me, which is less than a year old. I figure that I will make the family site the primary site with MSM as it is extremely unlikely that I will ever end that blog. Kind of important since the MSM docs says the first site cannot be removed (read that yesterday, but can’t find it in the docs now to link to it).

What I need to do is:

install MSM
add a new site
create an upload directory
create a category group and categories
create template groups and templates
export the entries from old blog to MT format and reimport them to the new MSM site

This seems a little tedious, especially all the copying and pasting of templates, and creating upload directory and categories. Is there an easier way to do this?

Also one question. Once I have everything set up, will my second site have an upload directory = {filedir_1} or will the second site have upload directories created sequentially after those in the first site. It’s important as I’ll need to do a find & replace if the second case is true since both sites now use upload directory {filedir_1} but when sites are combined will actually have two separate directories.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Mar 8, 2010 at 07:10 AM
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| tags: expressionengine, expressionengine 2.0, msm, |

Wordpress theme development -super speedy

Sunday February 21 2010

On Friday morning I recieved an email from my asking for a rush job on a wordpress theme where graphics were provided. I accepted the job with some trepidation as Wordpress is not my forte—any readers I do have will know that I love ExpressionEngine.

In any case I said I would aim for Tuesday. Well I’ve already finished it as of Sunday am. My total time developing the theme is about 8 hours with around half of that dealing with setting up the html/css and copying/pasting bits from the existing site. Developing was made easier due to using the Whiteboard theme as a framework for development. it has zero styling and minimal html added, but 95% of the wordpress code one needs for a basic blog already set-up. This was the biggest time saver for me and I’ll be using it again.

The other thing that helped is adding the sample wordpress content from WPcandy which is just an import file that adds several posts with all the content you need to ensure you don’t forget to style everything.

Multiple posts with different elements in each

12 Posts to force pagination

Blockquotes, lists—ordered and unordered—and floating images

Comments on a few of the posts

Parent, child, and grandchild categories and pages

Tags

Multiple months for the archives

The next time I do a wordpress theme, I will definitely be using both of these sources again and I highly recommend them to anyone else doing Wordpress theme development.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Feb 21, 2010 at 10:08 AM
(0)

| tags: themes, wordpress, add-ons, |

Linux: not for me

Friday January 08 2010

I’m a satisfied Windows user. However I’ve wanted to try out linux for some time to see what it is all about and whether it’s ready for the mainstream.

Over the past couple of years I’ve tried and failed to install linux 5 times prior to this past weekend. I tried ubuntu on my 2nd desktop a couple of times and then on my primary desktop i tried ubuntu, mint and suse. Each of these wouldn’t install—the install would start to run but never finish. I couldn’t figure out why as neither of my computers was particularly cutting edge at the time of the attempt.

This past Sunday after about 6 months since the last try I decided to give it another go and it finally installed. However after rebooting the computer went strait to Windows Vista. There was no option to choose my o/s and every guide I had looked at said that grub should automagically be there giving me the option to choose Ubuntu or Vista.

So I installed again and had the same problem. At this point I posted on the ubuntu forums and tweeted about the problem. The response on the ubuntu forum was pretty quick—better than most open source projects that I have used in the past (I’m looking at you Wordpress and Moodle). However the best help came from twitter from one guy I didn’t know gnimsha and also from another of my twitter followers Jason of InvokedProjects. Both were helpful, but Jason went Above and Beyond.

We went to a chat room where he gave me some things to try. Eventually it got so he wanted to see my computer screen as I did yet another install of ubuntu—at this point I had installed ubuntu about 4 times in one day—so I set up my laptop with my web cam pointed at the monitor of my desktop and moved to skype.

The solution it turned out to my problem of not being able to dual boot was to disconnect two of my hard drives and only have the drive with Vista and Ubuntu on there. Once I installed it again it would allow me to dual boot. I watched the install carefully and when grub is installed it goes directly to HD0 but my o/s is on HD2. Why grub doesn’t get installed on the same disk as the o/s is beyond me. I then connected my other two drives and was still able to dual boot. Yeah, success. But a lot of wasted time.

Playing with Ubuntu

Now I got into Ubuntu and was pleased to note that my audio and internet was working strait away—something that I heard didn’t always happen. After a couple of minutes I managed to get dual monitors working however was unable to rotate my right monitor to a vertical profile. Searching turned up several results for nvidia graphic cards but nothing for ATI which left me frustrated.

I then did something which I don’t remember the result of which was that I hosed Ubuntu and had to reinstall, yet again. At least the install for Ubuntu is very quick 12 minutes start to finish. Once again back into Ubuntu and I get dual monitors installed faster this time and even find out that I need the ATI drivers—install, reboot and it’s great—rotating fine.

Now I want to use a twitter app but none of the ones in the application directory are any good. I find out that tweetdeck and adobe air run on ubuntu. Great that’s what I use in Windows. I tried over and over to install air, but it won’t install—keeps failing. On twitter I asked about it and was told to go to adobe and install it there—nope, that’s what I did.

I also wanted to install a couple of other programs of which I cannot remember their name. Anyhow when I downloaded them and double clicked nothing happened or I was told that the correct application to install it wasn’t installed or I needed to use command line. So now to install programs, I need to learn a bunch of archaic shell commands. How does that make a computer easy to use? it doesn’t.

At this point, I’ve spent about 10-12 hours trying to use ubuntu—it’s not worth it. I have much better things to do with my time. I honestly don’t understand PC users who move to linux and claim it’s better. How is it better. It doesn’t “just work”, in fact it’s a major PITA to get it to work at all. Worried about viruses? I haven’t had a virus in 8 years on Windows.

Windows just works. I’m looking forward to installing Windows 7 this weekend because I know it will install without a hassle and just work just like every other version of Windows I’ve installed.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday Jan 8, 2010 at 08:04 AM

| tags: linux, windows, win7, vista, ubuntu, |

PHP - typos not welcome

Tuesday January 05 2010

After a few days away from PHP I’m back to reading PHP for Absolute Beginners I’m on page 85 right now. I’m going slow because I’m actually typing out all the exercises. Why type it out? Well I learn best by doing and by actually typing It’ll actually help me to remember the syntax.

One thing I’ve learned is that PHP is very finicky when it comes to syntax. One little typo and the whole script blows up and fails to execute properly. One of the most common typos I’m making is failing to type in the underscore for superglobals like $_POST and $_SERVER. Am also wondering if it’s okay to type those in lowercase or is PHP case sensitive?

update

turns out superglobals are case sensitive from @designchuchi via twitter .

One thing that PHP for Absolute Beginners recommends is to use an IDE. I am using the recommended one—Eclipse For the most part I like it as it has code highlighting. However one thing I’m not so keen on is the auto closing of tags, brackets, braces and quotes. In particular I don’t like auto closing quotes and brackets as it slows down my typing. inside quotes and brackets for the most part it seems I’m typing single words and at the end of the word I then have to look to the keyboard to find the arrow keys to move to the end of the auto closed bracket or quote. Is there a hot key command to skip to the end or a way to turn the auto closing off?

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Jan 5, 2010 at 02:47 PM

| tags: code, editor, php, eclipse, ide, |

Search Box - auto disappear/reappear text

Sunday January 03 2010

I was doing a couple of minor adjustments to my blog Repatriate Me! and found a very easy way to have a search box have text that will disappear on focus and then reappear when unfocused provided there is no user submitted text there.

I have to admit that I found this on another site, but it’s been removed from my browser history and I can’t remember the name of the site so am unable to provide proper credit at this time. If I can find it I will give credit—that’ll teach me to not document my code with finds.

Anyhow here is the ExpressionEngine code for the search box:

{exp:search:simple_form search_in="everywhere" weblog="BLOGNAME" id="search-form" name="search"}
    <input type="text" name="keywords" class="txt" size="18" maxlength="100" value="Search Here" title="" />
{/exp:search:simple_form} 

and the Javascript

<scr*pt type="text/javascript">
$('input').focus(function(){
   var defaultText = $(this).val();
    $(this).val('');

    $("input").blur( function () {
     var userInput = $(this).val();

            if (userInput == ''){
                  $(this).val(defaultText);
                }
        });
 });
</scr*pt> 