Ilaaka Drupal 5.12 goes LIVE!!! on 1st January, 2009

Hi,

First of all… wishing you very Happy New Year…!!! Hope you all will still be reeling under the effect the last evening… We too had a rocking time here in Ahmedabad. Last year was fun and hope that this year be the same for Openkick and Gloscon Family.

Apart from the new Year… Openkick team has another reason to cheer about, the site on which a team of Openkick was working for 2 months finally went Live on 1st January, 2008, 4 am IST!!! Yes, we are talking about the Ilaaka project.

Ilaaka was one of the first Migration projects that Openkick undertook. Although with some help from Gloscon, it successfully carried out the migration of Ilaaka from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5.12. We all know how what archaic systems can do and we found it out the hard way when we saw how existing modules were customized in order to reflect the desired functionality.

Openkick’s team was given the task to migrate the project and still follow the Drupal standards. So there was lot of cleaning up of code and modules which needs to be fixed. Since the site was developed in 2006 on Drupal, it had some very old modules. Having some neat web 2.0 features at that time would mean customizing the code or hacking the existing modules.

We made sure that the features remain intact while we migrate the complete system without touching the core. We found several features that needed some customization in the existing modules. Other features simply called for developing custom module which we did for Search, Blog and Profile functionality.

As with all the projects, this too had some really good learnings for all of us. I personally had a lot to take home from this project, be it the client communication, testing that we did or managing issues in strict time schedules.
I hope we get such really good projects, which gives every chance for a developer to test his limits.
Signing off!!!
Rajat Gupta