County conversion pre-requisite tasks

There are just a few tasks that can be undertaken prior to the conversion of a county to Drupal. These help get the county ready and will reduce the conversion time and the number of things to think about.

• Conversion cannot take place until the county gazetteer entries are enhanced with the addition of a unique place code in column R. Phil has code to generate an updated places.csv with suggested values in column R. These can be amended before conversion to Drupal, but after that no changes can be made. In the gazetteer statistics page, there is a red star against the parishes that still need column R setting. If column R has not been set, contact Phil who will generate an updated version of the places.csv file for this county containing suggested values. It is very likely that the location used to store the file will change as we are moving away from accessing it via the web for a gazetteer rebuild.
• The new places.csv file is generated directly from the existing database entries as that is the easiest way to deal with place name aliases. In some cases mistakes with aliases have crept in and where found Phil will contact you with details to resolve them. If you currently don't store the file at mythic, Phil will send you a replacement one with column R filled in. Otherwise the file will be stored in the new location at mythic and a link to it placed in your home directory. You should download a copy of that in case you wish to make future changes. The overnight gazetteer rebuild will use the new files. You can see where gazetteer looks for the file by looking in the section table.
• The change to html5 has produced a requirement for us to change the html that we use to define anchor links. These are those that we define near the top of a page to take us to a heading further down the page. <a href="#link">topic down page</a> links to <h3><a name="link">Topic down page</h3> For place pages the anchor links are automatically generated, but for those in plain pages we still use the original html code. This has to change, and that is done by the conversion software to  <h3><a id="link">Topic down page</h3>   The part that the conversion program can't handle is those with a link that starts with a numeric character or odd characters like punctuation. So if these links can be changed beforehand, it will make things easier.
• As part of the conversion process a number of urls (linking among the pages of the County being moved into in Drupal) have to be changed (see Pathing and Linking in GENUKI implemented in Drupal, which explains how urls within Drupal lack .html suffixes). The conversion software will make the appropriate changes. (However, as our move to Drupal is a staged conversion, if there are links to other counties or the country pages there will be a period when some these links might fail, as some of these pages may not yet be in Drupal. You can avoid some of these link failures by making changes beforehand  to urls that link to bits of GENUKI outside your county by removing index.html or index.shtml from those links. (It is not worth the effort of doing this for links within your county as they will be corrected by the conversion process.) Also do not convert any links to pages in sections of GENUKI that have already been converted into the new form by hand, otherwise the page conversion will try and make further changes which will be incorrect. You will see re-directs at this time and this will keep your links working. But if you do change links to the new url format before your county is converted, then there will be problems in your converted pages.
• The urls that change includes those for the gazetteer places.csv and church database churches.csv. We have actually started to move to an amended way of handling the csv files which makes it more secure, removes the need for web access as part of the update, easier to transfer files when the maintainer changes, and less chance of confusion if you maintain more than one county. So if you move to the new system before conversion there will be less chance of problems during that process.