Sometimes we need to do some maintenance.
Conductor is home to 88 live sites and 54 sites in development. Its a pretty big house; And we are the house-keepers. And as much as we’d like each Milestone to incorporate noticeable improvements, like a new coat of paint, or replacing that old shag carpet, sometimes we need to do maintenance on the furnace and re-caulk the windows. Nothing glamorous, but these changes can provide future energy savings. This milestone is one of those “maintenance” milestones.
Javascript Updates
We have converted our javascript framework from prototype.js to jquery.js. This change enables us to write more concise javascript, better ensure browser compatibility and tie into a plethora of open-source plugins; All of which enable us to more quickly improve a user’s experience through browser scripting.
Site Cloning
Another update is that we have created the ability to package up an existing site, and move it around within our different conductor environments. Wait? Different environments?
Wait? Different environments?
Conductor has four environments: Production, Staging, Development, and Test.
- Production is where a live website lives (i.e. http://conductor.nd.edu).
- Staging is a mirror of Production (same operating system, server configuration, etc.); It is the place where we go when we need verify changes that we have made in Development.
- Development is where I do most of my work. It is a version of Conductor that sits on each of the developer’s machine.
- Test is a version of Conductor that is rebuilt continually on our local machines. It allows for us to run automated test suites to give a cursory verification that things are still working.
We can now easily test changes to your site without altering the live site.
Prior to Milestone 1.5.9 we could copy the entire Conductor system from one environment to another (all 132 sites). That is a very slow process and is like tearing out the roof of a house to replace a lightbulb. What about a site redesign? Now we can pack up a Conductor site, and drop it into any environment (even the same one), without altering the original site.
Need a redesign without throwing out the entire site? Want to experiment with information architecture? Want to keep all the content, but start over with the design? We can now easily test changes to your site without altering the live site.