Migration gotchas, anybody?

Richard

After a fairly intense couple of weeks, I think I'm just about ready to unveil my new site. Before I pull the trigger, I thought I would ask what surprises (if any) people have had on publishing for the first time? No need to list bugs or feature requests covered in other threads. My concern at this point is if there are any differences between the live version and the preview in the sand pile, especially in the visitor view.

:ear

Thanks :thumb

LPC

Yes, the biggest surprise was just how much better it looked than before. Instantly. With such little effort. I almost envy you, I won't get to experience that again until Smugmug v3

AceCo55

If you have any password protected galleries, make a list of the passwords.
You can not see them in NewSmug.
If you don't ... and you need your passwords, contact the help desk and they will send you a list.
I'm pretty sure they can only send Legacy passwords.

Any password protected galleries created in NewSmug are just ****** to you and Smugmug.
If you forget a password in NewSmug, you will need to reset the password for that gallery - which is a problem if you need to contact a bunch of people to tell them what the new password is.

I just keep an Excel file to record all my passwords.
Cheers

ChancyRat

My site looked wrong and broken after I unveiled - but that was not so. The new code needed to switch over, and needed a little time to do so. I can't remember how long it took - I know I emailed DG in a panic, then refreshed a few more times, then closed the browser, cleared cookies, and restarted. Maybe 5-7 minutes? Then it looked exactly as I had seen in the "sandbox".

Richard

Thanks, guys. I knew about the password issue, so that's under control. Thanks for the tip, CR--I probably would have gone bonkers if that had happened to me without warning. It's getting a little late here, so I think I'll wait till morning to push the new site, unless someone posts something scary between now and then. I know it's not perfect, but on balance I think it's going to look a lot better than my old one, which was pretty much off-the-shelf SM style. Once it's live, I can fine tune it some and, oh yeah, get back to taking some pics .

jchin

AceCo55 wrote: »

If you have any password protected galleries, make a list of the passwords.
You can not see them in NewSmug.
If you don't ... and you need your passwords, contact the help desk and they will send you a list.
I'm pretty sure they can only send Legacy passwords.

Any password protected galleries created in NewSmug are just ****** to you and Smugmug.
If you forget a password in NewSmug, you will need to reset the password for that gallery - which is a problem if you need to contact a bunch of people to tell them what the new password is.

I just keep an Excel file to record all my passwords.
Cheers

Thank you for that info.
I think as "Pro" accounts, we should have an option to see the password, or at least have it e-mailed to us for a particular gallery should we need to give it to a client again. I'd hate to have a bride and groom notify their entire extended family and we had to reset the password.

Cygnus Studios

Other than passwords, I didn't have any issues. I would suggest that you make a back up of all your css before going live, just in case some hiccup happens out there in cyberspace.

leftquark

jchin wrote: »

Thank you for that info.
I think as "Pro" accounts, we should have an option to see the password, or at least have it e-mailed to us for a particular gallery should we need to give it to a client again. I'd hate to have a bride and groom notify their entire extended family and we had to reset the password.

The change to the Gallery Passwords is a security concern. You trust us with your photos and in order to keep them safe and private we have to take measures like this to ensures your gallery passwords are safe. As a Pro, it would be a lot more embarrassing for someone to get into a clients private photos, then to have to reset the password and re-distribute. With the New SmugMug we opted for the secure option. You only have to look at the news headlines to see how important photo security is.

ChancyRat wrote: »

My site looked wrong and broken after I unveiled - but that was not so. The new code needed to switch over, and needed a little time to do so. I can't remember how long it took - I know I emailed DG in a panic, then refreshed a few more times, then closed the browser, cleared cookies, and restarted. Maybe 5-7 minutes? Then it looked exactly as I had seen in the "sandbox".

Hmm... that sounds strange, it should have worked immediately. Over the past few months I've migrated tens of accounts and never seen this. I'll have QA dig into this.

Cygnus Studios wrote: »

I would suggest that you make a back up of all your css before going live, just in case some hiccup happens out there in cyberspace.

If you use Chrome, Sherlock Photograph created a SmugMug plugin that will also backup your CSS for you.

While it's always good to have a backup, everything remains the same when you publish. Publishing to New SmugMug doesn't actually copy anything the Preview to the Published version ... Everything you had before stays the same, we take what you had, and just flip a few bits so the UI knows to always display New SmugMug from then on.

Glad people could chime in. The gallery passwords are the big one that I can think of.

Richard

I published this morning. After a few hours of tweaking, I am happy with the results. :ivar

I did hit one gotcha, which I'll share for the benefit of those who have yet to publish. Despite extensive testing in the sandbox preview, I had two navigation failures (404s) when I published. With the help of Smug Hero Tomasz () I was able to sort it out quickly. I had a couple of unlisted galleries in my legacy site that I had decided to make public in the new one. But I must have neglected to change their visibility in the gallery settings. When I was setting up my menu, I used a link I copied (and tweaked) from the Organizer. The link worked fine in the preview because I was logged in, but it failed for the visitor view.

If the preview had a visitor view option, I would have avoided this problem. I'm a little disappointed that the preview in the new, live version only seems to offer the logged-in view, not the visitor view as well. While it's true that was also the case in legacy, it remains a shortcoming, IMO.

Other than that, things worked pretty much as expected. I had a few minor gallery settings wrong, but these were easy to correct quickly. I did have to make some CSS tweaks, especially in the lightbox visitor view, but I'm happy to say that I was able to figure these out on my own (finally, :whew).

Think I'll have a glass of wine before lunch--and take long siesta after.

Thanks to all for your help.

ChancyRat

Glad it stabilized! By the way - I think - not 100% sure if this depends on the type of SM account you have - you can customize the "Page not found" page too.
Go to a URL on your site that is broken ("make it break") - then "Customize".

One question about your site generally: the galleries on the home page are not centered - they're left-justified. Did you want this?

Richard

Thanks for looking, CR. I knew about the 404 page customization, but don't know whether it's available for Power accounts. For the time being, I'm much more concerned about avoiding 404s in the first place .

As for the justification, I didn't see any option to center the content blocks. The only justification option I saw was for titles, which I do want on the left. For the time being, I only want six choices, two rows of three each. Each row is a separate widget, which enabled me to reduce the vertical space between them. I suppose it must look a little weird on a mega wide screen, dunno, but I would guess six smallish pics in the middle of a huge screen would also look weird. I work on a 1920 x 1080 screen and don't generally have my browser at full screen, so I probably didn't notice it. Dunno, I'll have to play around with it some more. Thanks for raising the question--I appreciate it .

denisegoldberg

Richard wrote: »

I knew about the 404 page customization, but don't know whether it's available for Power accounts. For the time being, I'm much more concerned about avoiding 404s in the first place.

It is available for Power accounts. It's probably worth customizing the page since you can't avoid typos by your viewers!

There are other pages you can customize as well - http://school.smugmug.com/SmugMug-Tips/Customize-Your-System-Pages.

--- Denise

Richard

Thanks, Denise. I'll keep it in mind, but for the time being I'm hoping to give it a rest.

Cygnus Studios

Richard wrote: »

I did hit one gotcha, which I'll share for the benefit of those who have yet to publish. Despite extensive testing in the sandbox preview, I had two navigation failures (404s) when I published. With the help of Smug Hero Tomasz () I was able to sort it out quickly.

This is one important part of the equation that doesn't get talked about a lot. Obviously Smugmug cannot make all of us completely happy, especially when it comes to changes. However their heroes do an incredible job when it comes to fixing things and helping us achieve as much as we can.

pbandj

I had a glitch after I unveiled as well...it's been a few weeks and I've forgotten the details...it was that I'd created a couple of galleries in an unlisted folder and misunderstood how I could use them...it wasn't apparent until I unveiled.

I miss the "Visitor View" we had in Old Smug; I used that regularly.

DmitryS

pbandj wrote: »

I miss the "Visitor View" we had in Old Smug; I used that regularly.

You can open an browser window in incognito mode to get the same effect, right?

leftquark

DmitryS wrote: »

You can open an browser window in incognito mode to get the same effect, right?

Yep! This is usually what I do.

Richard wrote: »

I published this morning. After a few hours of tweaking, I am happy with the results. :ivar

Thanks to all for your help.

Looks great Richard! I especially like how your "New Pics" gallery displays the photo # in the center on mouse hover!

Richard

DmitryS wrote: »

You can open an browser window in incognito mode to get the same effect, right?

Yes, but that's not what I'm requesting. Using a separate non-logged in browser (or the legacy Visitor View in SM) is only useful after changes have been published to the live site. I would like the option to see the visitor view in Preview, before I publish. My site has several customizations that depend on whether it's the logged-in owner or a visitor that's viewing. SM itself does different things depending on the login state.

One of the more memorable moments in my programming career was receiving an email on Christmas morning from the project architect that read "I've moved the changes into Production--please test them there." :bash :bash :bash That's exactly what we're doing here, and I think we can do better.

Richard

leftquark wrote: »

Looks great Richard! I especially like how your "New Pics" gallery displays the photo # in the center on mouse hover!

Thanks, Aaron. The number on hover was a life saver for me. My old site was SM style, and I was used to communicating with visitors using the pic number in the gallery. That was gone in Collage view (though my stats have increased by an order of magnitude ). I got the CSS hack from Sherlock Photography. I could never have figured that one out myself. Thanks, Nicholas !

Richard

Cygnus Studios wrote: »

This is one important part of the equation that doesn't get talked about a lot. Obviously Smugmug cannot make all of us completely happy, especially when it comes to changes. However their heroes do an incredible job when it comes to fixing things and helping us achieve as much as we can.

The heroes have responded quickly and effectively. They made the migration much easier. As did all the Dgrinners, who made a world of difference. clap

Richard

ChancyRat wrote: »

One question about your site generally: the galleries on the home page are not centered - they're left-justified. Did you want this?

I looked into this today and figured out what was going on. I had the home page body width set to auto px. I figured this would make it play better on a variety of devices. But auto (combined with stretchy) produces some strange behavior: If you start from full width and slowly reduce the browser width, the right margin shrinks for a while, but at some point, the pics all get smaller and the margin increases again. This can happen three or four times. It's not as continuous as the changes that occur if you do the same thing with a collage display. Changing the body width to fixed makes the content look a little more centered at all times. Not too sure what the best setting is, but I chose 1100 pixels for now and will tweak that if necessary.

Thanks again for pointing this out.

ChancyRat

Richard wrote: »

I looked into this today and figured out what was going on. I had the home page body width set to auto px. I figured this would make it play better on a variety of devices. But auto (combined with stretchy) produces some strange behavior: If you start from full width and slowly reduce the browser width, the right margin shrinks for a while, but at some point, the pics all get smaller and the margin increases again. This can happen three or four times. It's not as continuous as the changes that occur if you do the same thing with a collage display. Changing the body width to fixed makes the content look a little more centered at all times. Not too sure what the best setting is, but I chose 1100 pixels for now and will tweak that if necessary.

Thanks again for pointing this out.

I'm *sure* there is something to set this to center... just don't know what it is...