Virtualmin.com migration

[Joe]

Howdy all,

Once again, I will be attempting to migrate us out of the infernal Drupal 7 instance that has consumed my days and occupied my nightmares for so long.

I’ve ironed out the problems I had with the migration module, and so, I’ll be putting the Drupal site into read-only mode for a few hours starting some time in the afternoon on 7/11. Assuming all goes well, sometime by tomorrow night we’ll be switched to the new WordPress/WooCommerce site (see previous news post about it for more details if you’re interested).

The process is long and slow, much of it manual (I’ve automated what I could, but even with my best efforts and spending money on tools to help, there is still plenty of mess to clean up manually), so it’ll be read-only for much of the day. If you need private help with your Pro products during that time, you can send a PM to the @staff group, as that’s how we’ll be handling support tickets henceforth, anyway.

Thanks for your continued patience.

Cheers,
Joe

[Joe]

The switch has been flipped. Mostly.

Quick facts everybody ought to know:

Virtualmin.com now points to the new WordPress system. I can’t say I’m particularly proud of it yet, but it does work (mostly), and it allows us to start sorting out subscriptions, and escape huge longstanding issues with Drupal Commerce.

This forum now authenticates to the WordPress site, instead of the Drupal site (and thus we leave behind that stupid SSO bug in the Drupal integration). There were a tiny number of “weird” users (mostly users who had two of the same account name, only with some form of punctuation to distinguish between them, and the migrater cowardly refused to create those users), so I manually created them with slightly different new names; you should be able to login by using your email address. It is possible there are other user anomalies that I didn’t spot; we have 80k+ registered users, even after I purged all the blocked/unvalidated users. I couldn’t check them all, but I did several database sanity checks, and I think most folks are going to have their accounts Just Work. Holler at me, if not (but try getting in with your email address, password reset, etc. first, I’m very tired, and I still have a lot to do to make this site work reasonably).

Your Pro licenses are in the new system (under My Account->Software Licenses, and at /software-licenses); you won’t yet be able to easily renew or upgrade existing licenses, but new licenses can be managed entirely by you; you can upgrade and downgrade, cancel, and renew and update billing info, etc. all within the My Account page. If you need new licenses or you need to change old licenses, feel free to just buy a new license that suits you rather than messing about with the old one and let the old one expire (you can use the virtualmin change-license command to quickly change the serial number and key to the new one without any downtime or weirdness).

There are many quirks. The site aint pretty.

The docs are an absolute disaster. They’re mostly in Markdown, and while WordPress with JetPack supports Markdown, the importer didn’t mark them as Markdown, so I have to visit each page of the docs (all 500 of them), and click edit, mess around with the text, and then save it, so it gets detected as Markdown and actually renders reasonably. I’m not fond of this situation, but at least the docs exist.

And, for “just in case” purposes, the Drupal site now lives on archive.virtualmin.com. Everything is still there (tickets in particular), and will remain there for some time; it will remain in read-only mode. No more users, tickets or orders will be accepted there, but you can login and see your tickets, etc. there, while I figure out what we’re doing with those (I have written a script for importing into Discourse, but it’s still a bit messy and I don’t want to fight with anything else today). Support requests for Pro products can be sent as a PM to @staff here at the forum.

I’m sure a lot of stuff is broken that I don’t even know about…I’ll find it and fix it over the next few days.

Thank you for your patience. Feel free to go buy some software, so we can pay Ilia and Eric properly this month.

Now, I’m sleeping. Y’all don’t break anything while I’m away.

Cheers,
Joe

[calport]

Well done, @Joe. This is a tremendous effort you have made in migrating the site and info. The authentication to the forum and the Virtualmin license system was the important functionality, the rest can be made better as we go forward.

The community is available to assist with clerical or repetitive work so that your time is best utilized, do holler if we can be of assistance.

[unborn]

@Joe if you would kindly create GitHub repo for documentation I could kindly help to convert them into html static site with search form. I can even write bash script for you which will convert all MD files to static site, and matching your website. All I need is MD files and I will take care of it. Besides git repository for documentation would be great idea no?

Edit, not need for GitHub repo, just git repository. Btw bash script I mean script will loop via MD files and generate html file for each, no any other software need it, just pure bash and that’s it.