Create a backup of your SmugMug customisations

thenickdude

I have created an extension for Google Chrome which allows you to back up your SmugMug site's customisations. Backed-up content includes the settings for the content blocks you've added to your pages (particularly the contents of Text, HTML and CSS content blocks), gallery descriptions, and theme CSS.

It's important to create a backup of your site, because it's easy to accidentally click the wrong button and trash a customisation or page that took a long time to build (I've done this a couple of times already!). It's also possible for some accident or crash at SmugMug to lose information, so it's nice to have a backup you control.

The tool doesn't have an automatic restore feature, so it can't recreate backed-up pages for you. The intention is that you would copy and paste information from the backup to recreate pages yourself.

You can find out more about this feature and install this extension from my website here:

http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Backup

This extension is open source under the MIT License, if you're a JavaScript developer you can read the sourcecode here:

https://github.com/Sherlock-Photography/smugmug-chrome-ext

denisegoldberg

I've installed the "official" release, thanks!

--- Denise

Johnwd

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I've installed the "official" release, thanks!

--- Denise

Can you leave us a link to the official release please , John

thenickdude

It's the green button on the page about it:

http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Backup

I've now updated to version 0.1.4, which adds the ability to see the details of your Entire Site design, which appears at the bottom of the tree under "Site Designs". This design was already being backed up, but now actually gets displayed so you can see it .

Chrome will automatically update you to the latest version in a couple of hours, or you can manually update by going to Tools -> Extensions, ticking the "developer mode" tickbox, then clicking "update extensions now". The version number next to "unofficial smugmug extension for chrome" should update to 0.1.4 after a couple of minutes.

AceCo55

Installed - thank you very much. Very generous of you to share your hard work and knowledge. Much appreciated.

denisegoldberg

Lamah wrote: »

I've now updated to version 0.1.4, which adds the ability to see the details of your Entire Site design, which appears at the bottom of the tree under "Site Designs". This design was already being backed up, but now actually gets displayed so you can see it .

I've installed the latest and verified that I can now see the Entire Site CSS, thanks!

--- Denise

brandofamily

Lamah wrote: »

It's the green button on the page about it:

http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Backup

I've now updated to version 0.1.4, which adds the ability to see the details of your Entire Site design, which appears at the bottom of the tree under "Site Designs". This design was already being backed up, but now actually gets displayed so you can see it .

Chrome will automatically update you to the latest version in a couple of hours, or you can manually update by going to Tools -> Extensions, ticking the "developer mode" tickbox, then clicking "update extensions now". The version number next to "unofficial smugmug extension for chrome" should update to 0.1.4 after a couple of minutes.

Is there a specific reason for doing this w/ Chrome browser? I usually stick w/ Firefox as every time Chrome is used (by my daughter) we get bunches of bots and malware...

thenickdude

Chrome is the browser I use, and has a powerful extension API. That's it, pretty much.

Check your list of installed extensions and just remove everything. Your daughter probably added some malware as a Chrome extension or something.

brandofamily

Lamah wrote: »

Chrome is the browser I use, and has a powerful extension API. That's it, pretty much.

Check your list of installed extensions and just remove everything. Your daughter probably added some malware as a Chrome extension or something.

Thanks. Trying it now... I've never seen a progress meter go back and forth while working

raebrown

Works like a charm! Thanks for this Nicholas.

southeasternphotography

I get a Chrome message saying "Apps, extensions, and user scripts cannot be added from this website". There is a learn more button which goes to a place where it says Google Chrome has changed the way it deals with downloading extensions from sites other than the Chrome Webstore. Using Macintosh Powerbook, OSX-10.6.8 and Chrome version 31.0.1622.0 dev. Interestingly, when I go to "About Google Chrome" to get the version number, I see Chrome trying to do an update which then fails. Going to close all tabs and see if it still does it.

denisegoldberg

southeasternphotography wrote: »

I get a Chrome message saying "Apps, extensions, and user scripts cannot be added from this website". ...Interestingly, when I go to "About Google Chrome" to get the version number, I see Chrome trying to do an update which then fails. Going to close all tabs and see if it still does it.

You need to install the tool yourself. The instructions are on the help page linked in the first post of this thread (just after the download button) - http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Backup.

Once the download completes, click on the menu button in Chrome, then "Tools -> Extensions". Drag and drop the file you downloaded onto the list of Chrome extensions, and you should get prompted to install it. After installation, the extension will automatically keep itself up to date.

--- Denise

southeasternphotography

denisegoldberg wrote: »

You need to install the tool yourself. The instructions are on the help page linked in the first post of this thread (just after the download button) - http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Backup.


--- Denise

Got it and it works. Had some kind of Chrome issue. Went and re-downloaded it. Had to change permissions on the old one to delete it before I could get the new one installed. The updater thing says I am now up to date. Anyway, the backup works GREAT!

thenickdude

Yeah, Chrome will give you all sorts of notices letting you know that the extension won't be installed, because they only allow automatic installation for extensions in their Web Store. However, if you ignore those messages, it does install using that manual drag and drop procedure.

brandofamily

Lamah wrote: »

Yeah, Chrome will give you all sorts of notices letting you know that the extension won't be installed, because they only allow automatic installation for extensions in their Web Store. However, if you ignore those messages, it does install using that manual drag and drop procedure.

Saved the back-up file, but how do I open it to view it later?

thenickdude

Visit your site again and click the option to back up your site. Then click on the "open backup file" button instead of the "start backup" one, and it should let you pick the backup.

markmicallef

Lamah,

Installed and running it now, thanks so much for this! Myself like many Smuggers have a lot of time in our sites. This is a nice comfort to have.

Thanks again.

southeasternphotography

Once again, why did SmugMug not give us this capability like they had in Legacy? It's like they didn't even know what code they had when they rebuilt the system. Depressing. Someone said "Ready, Fire, Aim".

thenickdude

Well, there's not one "Custom CSS" box to back up like there was on Legacy, so they basically need to give you a backup of your complete site structure and content block layout in order for you to find the CSS you wanted to recover. Don't forget that you can have an arbitrary number of different site designs and site themes too! That's an infeasible amount of information to sort through if they used the simple "email me my customisations" mechanism they had before. So they have to make a backup viewer to go along with it. And ideally the backup viewer could render the backed-up pages just like in the customiser. And wouldn't it be cool if you could pick pages and have them restored automatically. And then before you know it, you've built a massive "page revisions" system that takes a long time to build, needs a bunch of new APIs added which might have security implications, and requires a bunch of planning and storage on their servers.

Even if they just decided to let you download a structured backup of your site contents, and leave it to someone else to write a backup viewer for it, they would still have to document and freeze the structure of a bunch of their internal Content Block settings data. That's not only a huge effort, but it makes it harder to make improvements to SmugMug in the future (since changes could break the documented layout of the structured backup).

Sometimes, a limited hack like this one is the best option. Less development time, core features work fine, not much to break if changes are made to SmugMug. But it's not really a polished product that they would add to their own interface, and couldn't be.

southeasternphotography

Wow Lamah, that was a superific explanation! Well done, and I back off my previous comment! Well done indeed. Also, so is your solution! Many thanks.

SergeBerrardVisuals

works like a charm here.
thank you very much !

juanheredia

Great work. Thanks for sharing. It's working fine.

mountaindew

Lamah wrote: »

I have created an extension for Google Chrome which allows you to back up your SmugMug site's customisations. Backed-up content includes the settings for the content blocks you've added to your pages (particularly the contents of Text, HTML and CSS content blocks), gallery descriptions, and theme CSS.

It's important to create a backup of your site, because it's easy to accidentally click the wrong button and trash a customisation or page that took a long time to build (I've done this a couple of times already!). It's also possible for some accident or crash at SmugMug to lose information, so it's nice to have a backup you control.

The tool doesn't have an automatic restore feature, so it can't recreate backed-up pages for you. The intention is that you would copy and paste information from the backup to recreate pages yourself.

You can find out more about this feature and download this extension on my website here:

http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Backup

This extension is open source under the MIT License, you can read the sourcecode here:

https://github.com/Sherlock-Photography/smugmug-chrome-ext

Nicholas , Loved this backup process as of now and looking for Auto backup and restore facility embedded in the product itself by SM . By that time "Many thanks" for your hard effort ... you rock ...:ivar

W.W. Webster

Lamah wrote: »

It's the green button on the page about it:

http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Backup

I push that, then what?

thenickdude

W.W. Webster wrote: »

I push that, then what?

Check out the instructions written under the button:

Once the download completes, click on the menu button in Chrome, then "Tools -> Extensions". Drag and drop the file you downloaded onto the list of Chrome extensions, and you should get prompted to install it. After installation, the extension will automatically keep itself up to date.

Just checking, you are using the Google Chrome webbrowser, right?

W.W. Webster

Thanks, and yep - I'm using Chrome! After dragging and dropping (not very intuitive!), I wasn't asked to install it but it now shows as being 'enabled' in the extensions list, so I should be good to go.

thenickdude

Great! Chrome intentionally makes it difficult for you because they want the extension to be installed from their Web Store, instead of manually installed from another website like I'm doing here.

W.W. Webster

It's running nicely as we speak!

leftquark

Lamah,
Quick question: While browsing your sherlock customization site I noticed you have your code formatted all fancy / nice. How do you place the Code (via CodeMirror?) on your site so it looks all fancy formatted? Do you have to generate the HTML/CSS somewhere else, then paste it in as a HTML/CSS block?

thenickdude

Yeah, the only option available is to format the code elsewhere as you said and paste it in as a HTML/CSS block. For example, it's possible to view your code using CodeMirror on some other website (or even in SmugMug's code editors), copy the HTML code it renders using the Web Developer tools, then paste it into an HTML block here on SmugMug. It'll pick up the CSS that SmugMug already includes for their CodeMirror displays, which will do the formatting for you. You'd have to tweak the HTML a bit to make it fit better. Alternatively, find some other site that will generate HTML/CSS for sourcecode for you, and paste that in.

I'm using CodeMirror directly on my site, but I'm only able to do that by hacking my site to support JavaScript, and this method isn't really suitable for sharing with people, sorry!

TammyGPhoto

this works like a charm!! thx!!