There will be a Joomla Development Workshop happenning on September 25th. My good friend Aaron Handford from Floating World Development will be teaching there. One of their most recent projects has been the launch of Earls Restaurants website using the Joomla! 1.5 content management platform. There might be still some spaces available. If you would like to register click here
Author Archive for Rastin Mehr
Tazzu is going to be revived and this time using the Anahita Social Engine as the platform of choice within 6-8 weeks. We were going to do that anyway, and it is very likely that we can migrate all the users and about 50% of the restored content from the old forum to the new platform.
Please stay tunned and follow us:
- on this blog
- on Twitter: @tazzu
- and on the Tazzu facebook page
Well it seems that MediaTemple won’t be able to give us any database backups, because they don’t have any to provide.
The lesson we have learned from this incidence: “Never ever trust the administration tools shipped with your blogs and forum apps” stick to your reliable old fashion tools such as command line interface. We lost our data because PHPBB3 backup and restore didn’t quite work! Perhaps they should spend more time improving those features, in the mean time I should have continued using more reliable methods of administration such as getting a straight mysqldump from the database myself.
So we are left with 2 options. We will clean up the mess and start with a clean forum all over again. Fortunately all the user accounts still seem to be there.
The other option would be an early deployment of Anahita Social Engine for Tazzu which will take 2-3 weeks. In fact, if we see that fixing PHPBB3 will be taking a way too much of our time and resources we would rather invest that into the deployment using the Anahita.
I have talked to MediaTemple and there is a chance that they could provide us an older database backup. The data maybe a month old, but the forum has had a slow traffic during the July anyway. We are still waiting for their response!
If we see that we will be spending too much time fixing the issues with PHPBB3, we may move forwared to roll in the Anahita Social Engine platform earlier than expected.
Update Sat. 8:35 PM: I must say I got carried away out of frustration about the PHPBB3 in this post. People tend to react like that especially if they’ve lost 2-3 years worth of data over a non-functioning upgrade patch, however I must say that folks on the PHPBB3 have been quite helpful answering our technical questions on their forum, and since this is a GPL software they really have no obligation to spend time worrying about our business. Thank you so much PHPBB3 team and I apologize for over reacting in my 5:00 AM post.
(Original Post in 5:00 AM)
Hello Tazzu,
I have bad news, I spent over 12 hours trying to upgrade the forum and almost every patch failed half way through the upgrade. I did make both file and database backups of the original Tazzu, but for some reason after restoration, many of the topics are no longer accessible.
I do not know what the problem is and I must say I am not by any means impressed by PHPBB3 and their patches. Major fail! I’ve never seen an application bail out on me like this.
It is 5:00 AM right now and I need to get some sleep. I will continue working to see if I can revive the forum back. I really apologize for what happened. Did I mention how much I am not impressed by PHPBB3? I cannot wait till we migrate to Anahita! There we have good code and simple design, and not this spaghetti code with a pretty interface on top that we are using.
Please continue posting the bugs reports, I’m sure they are out there!
Hello again,
I’ve been working at the forum again. The terribly bad news is that we have lost our data. The good news is that at least I know what happened. Here is what went wrong:
When I used the feature Maintenance > Backup in the PHPBB3 apparently the php-execution-time timed out and not all of the databse was backed up. Later I have found out that the backup file is only 16.9 MB instead of 53 MB that PHPBB3 was reporting.
So after setting up the forum I realized that many posts have simply vanished.
The mistake I’ve made was that I trused PHPBB3s backup, normally I would have done a straight databasedump directly from the databse or using phpMyAdmin, but this time I had the impression that “nice, phpbb3 has provided all my maintenance tools to me!”
and not to shift the blame to the phpbb3 directly, having known that Maintenance > Backup could fail like this, I would have increased the php execution time on the MediaTemple account and then would have created a backup.
The only sensible option left is to purge the past data and start again. One issue will be user’s who have a high post count, in that case I’ll see if I can preserve everyone’s post counts or bump all the members with high post counts to chartered members.
At the end, we can’t wait to migrate Tazzu to the Anahita Social Engine ™ platform. It is much more managable code with actual discussion boards and groups that allow you create your own groups, and tag your topics as you go.
I’ll continue working on cleaning up the mess during the weekend and yes upgrading the phpBB3 code since we will be still using it for at least another 2-3 months.
You can follow the conversation on the PHPBB3 forums here
We are performing upgrades on the forums and therefore it won’t be available to you until we’re done. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Kind regards,
Rastin
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