hungrysquirrel, what Lisa said.
Also, FTP is a bit notorious for silently or somewhat silently failing to properly overwrite files already present, when it’s uploading.
This has often been responsible for tense and lengthy support conversations where persons feel ‘something is wrong’, so it’s a very good idea to use a procedure where this won’t happen.
Also, there’s a good feeling of actual security, in knowing your whole site is still there, in the database backup you did, and in the re-named site folders.
If something actually does go wrong, then, as in a real web world it may, you can be back to the old site in a very few minutes, by dropping and restoring the database from your backup, and with a few keystrokes returning to the original folder names.
I’d like to take this moment to compliment the whole EE crew for how they’ve handled this momentary problem, starting with Robin, who’s been very true to her responsibility about it. Leslie himself knows what he’s been doing, and it is appreciated as right on the mark seen here.
A fault in delivery can happen to anyone, and I have seen exactly the same thing happen this week on another set of sophisticated and characterful software; also professionally recovered. In an earlier long history as an interventionist consultant, I’ve seen it happen in quite ‘high-end’ situations; names you would know. The level of testing to mostly prevent such things is possible only in the most massively overcapitalized ventures, and even then it is necessarily insufficient, so that they slip: consider the relative successes of NASA and Microsoft, and also their episodes. Google also.
We can be pretty masterful about all the myriad detail actually present in today’s arrangements, and there are tools and methods that help us greatly. Once in a while, it’s going to take about one small detail overlooked or mistaken, or one wrong turn taken in a framework’s design, to bring this down for a moment, and that is the reality to recognize and to work with cheerfully, for the benefit all these modern arrangements gain us.
In ExpressionEngine’s case, we get great results, more than is often appreciated. We have a pairing of abilities, in the Ellis team, and in the community of communities, who working together save moments, and equally build the quick feature responses we’re now so used to having. The flexibility and conversation is also the resilience and generativity, and that’s what makes this corner of the world work.
You wouldn’t want to go back to any old way there was; or equally, to some imagined path of perfection in the ‘boughten product’ universe; at least that’s the view from here. Packaged products are slow, and in their proportion, on the way out. Adaptive compacts and arrangements, a much more personal and interesting future, it would seem.
I guess I get to write such things once in a while on a Saturday, anyway 😉. Compliments to each here.
Clive