Missing Features

Your correspondent recently led the launch of a large, highly customized Drupal installation that required a two-day phased launch and coordination with the client team. In order to ensure a smooth launch, a launch checklist was started at the beginning of the project and added to over the course of development. As we completed various modules we would add steps to the checklist to ensure we didn’t forget anything at launch time.

The project was Neon Tommy, the online, student-run journalism site of the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. Neon Tommy creates original news content and is a fully managed news portal. The existing site was built on Movable Type and we had to migrate all of this existing content into Drupal.

In addition to the launch checklist below, we had already run the site through our standard web site launch checklist. This checklist is designed for any web site launch, not just Drupal sites. This checklist focused on the tasks we needed to complete during launch.

Here is the launch checklist, in three parts:

Pre-migration checklist

• Meet internally to plan migration
• Prepare launch schedule
• Meet w/client to review launch schedule
• Update DNS TTL
• Prepare launch content

Migration checklist

• Backup database, web root
• Run data import
• Rename stage site to production
• Request DNS update
• Setup HOSTS files to continue with migration during DNS update
• Update Twitter account to use production Twitter site
• Update Facebook account to use production FB account
• Import help page
• Update Google Analytics tracking code
• Register sitemap with Google
• Add the “force www” setting
• Register with Google Webmaster tools
• Update FeedBurner as needed
• Install new Google Maps API key
• Setup Google mini, add collection and URLs, configure Google
• Update Binary Canary (monitoring)
• Update the email address setting in the Site Information page
• Verify PathAuto is able to handle characters with odd accents
• Perform standard Drupal refinements
  • Disable devel module
  • Disable Theme developer
  • Disable “Rebuild theme cache on every page load” setting
  • Set maintenance theme to use site theme
  • Set Drupal performance settings: Page Cache to normal, page compression enabled, block cache enabled, optimize CSS enable and optimize JS enabled
  • Increase database logging row limit to 10,000
  • Set error reporting to log only (not log+screen)
  • Verify non-trusted users do not have access to full HTML and PHP filters
  • Set “session.cookie_lifetime” to 86400
  • Setup CRON
  • Remove TXT files in Drupal root
• Setup Droptor; confirm all checklists are green
• Update wiki page (internal documentation)
• Clear cached data
• Verify status report shows all green
• Verify DNS update complete
• Post migration message to old live site
• Post redirect .htaccess file to old external site content

Post-migration

• Perform QA testing
• Notify client when complete
• Perform marketing items
  • Tweet launch
  • Portfolio update
  • Home page news item
  • Internal message to team
• Schedule muffin basket to client

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