Note to self: Make sure your testbed reflects reality
As you may have noticed, I have updated the site to the latest version of Drupal . This was partly due to the enhanced functionality of the new version, but mainly so that I could integrate the latest version of Gallery into my private family site , which is hosted on the same server. You may have also noticed, that I had to take the site down again yesterday to fix a few bugs. Here's why:
As any self-respecting admin would do, I tested the upgrades of both the Drupal environment and the Gallery software, as well as the module that connects the two, on a separate test system that I have running on my box at home prior to updating the production site. This worked fine. So on Tuesday, I started to run the update of the main site.
Of course there were a few things that didn't work right from the start. This is mainly due to the fact that not all modules that I used on the site have been updated to the new 4.7 version of Drupal, yet. But that was to be expected. What I dind't expect, was to trun into major problems with the URL-rewite feature.
Basically, URL Rewrite turns the rather cryptic URLs generated by Drupal (http://mysite.com/?q=node/23) into a "cleaner" format, that search engine bots (like Googlebot) can deal with more easily. In my Drupal 4.6 installation this worked fine for both sites. With the new RC3 version of Drupal 4.7 if I try to enable it for both sites, Drupal gets into a total ind and starts mixing up the two sites.
It took me the whole of Wednesday to work out exactly what the relationship between the two sites and Gallery was in this respect and to fix it so that at least the main site works with clean URLs. This is why I had to take down both sites in order to fix these issues.
So why didn't I see this in my testbed? Simple: I had only set up Drupal with a single site on the test system, so this problem never occured. That'll teach me in future! 