When you use midgard you loose the ability to use apache to perform redirects for your site as the midgard module deals with any urls relating to hosts that it has in its database. While we had set up redirects using a php script:

173: $redirect_array["woodlands"]="/campaigns/landclearing/";

174: $redirect_array["yellabinna"]="/campaigns/outback/yellabinna/";

175:

176:

177: foreach($redirect_array as $key=>$value) {

178:

179: if (strtolower($argv[0]) == strtolower($key)) {

180: $redirect_string="Location: ".$value;

181: echo $redirect_string."
";

182: header ($redirect_string);

183: exit();

184: }

185: }

186: ?>

it only worked for links going straight from our main page and I wanted something that was as easy to use as apache redirects. As we are using Squid as a reverse proxy for our site getting squid to perform the redirects seemed like a good approach and might well be more efficient that doing it using php in midgard. There are number of specially designed redirectors for squid and you can even just use a simple perl script to perform redirects. The one I chose to use was Jesred which you can easily install using apt on Debian systems. The steps involved in setting it up where:

To get the TWS Midgard implementation to utilise many of the features found in the Aegir Admin interface it was necessary to modify some of the code in Aegir.

Only one element in Aegir was modified. This Element was the ROOT style element in Aegir_Master_Style.
(If you are using Spider-Admin to do these modifications you can go to http://www.sitename.org/admin-spider/style/element/101.html)

This is a CMS that aims to take the technological power of PHPSlash and develop a more traditional CMS suitable for NGO's and Not for Profit Organisations.

Installation

Very easy install. I just simply unpacked the tar.gz file in my webservers root directory and then followed the Quick Install Instructions in the INSTALL.html file. Needed to change the ownership of the files in the public_html directory to www-data first. Also needed to created a database, how to do all these things is explained quite well in the detailed installation instructions so I recommend reading those for people who haven't done many CMS installs before.

Then it is just simply a matter of answering a few questions in the install pages most of which have acceptable defaults already entered, I also chose to install the sample data. Then just click on the Start Using Back-End link and you will be taken to the Front Page.

Using the System

Click on the Login link at the bottom of the page. Login with username "god" and password "password". I was then taken to the administration page where there were a couple of notices reminding me about securing my setup properly. This is pretty good and not something that I have noticed in other CMS installs I have done. I followed the instructions of both notices and when I refreshed the page one of the notices was removed but the other, "chmod 644 /var/www/back-end0.7.0/public_html/*.php stayed there. Looking at it I could see that because I had both owner and group as www-data, www-data therefore had write permissions. Changed the owner to root for everything in the public_html directory

   chown -R root /var/www/back-end0.7.0/public_html/

The procedure to upgrade from 4.1 to 4.2 is the same as used in upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1. You need to unpack the drupal_4.2.tar.gz package into a directory in /var/www/ and then point your browser to that script and follow its simple instructions. Of course it wasn't quite that simple.



First make sure that you back up your original database. What I did then was create a new database and then insert the old database into the new database. This was to minimise my downtime if I had to change back.