Red Nose Day 2013
June 1, 2012Every year there are more and more challenges, and this is exactly the way I like it to be. So long as it's a realistic obstacle, then resolving it and planning a solution can be very satisfying. This campaign our systems architect has moved on to pastures new and we were also migrating our sites to a new host, so it fell to me to stand in for a few months whilst we recruited for the role. This meant constant communication with the hosts, planning how SOLR would be rebuilt, restructuring elements of the site, and briefing in changes to other members of the team. Then, once we had the position filled, there was a detailed handover process to ensure they understood as well as possible what had happened prior.
Then we move onto the website, this year we moved on to Drupal 7 for the build, and we were very glad we did. There were some noticeable improvements in core, and a lot of the newer contrib modules we wanted to use were only available if we upgraded. All in all things went well this campaign, targets were hit and destroyed, fun was had, and the site was built.
As with any project though, you learn from things which may have not been 100% and this year I think it was largely around communication between the various team members. For example the validation of forms may be done by someone other than the form developer, so ensuring they know to communicate in the first place is something to look into more in the future. Also, delving into SR14 now, we have some more Drupal Architecture plans, but of course, that is all top secret ;-)