• How to restore a Drupal website too old for manual upgrades

    Owners of websites that remained frozen for a year or more, because the _projects _they represent also were closed, or greatly slowed down their activity, face a big problem when those projects restart: updating the website without losing all its old content is really, really hard, if not impossible. Here is how I faced this problem with an old Drupal website, with an approach that can work on many other websites running off some database.

  • Dbmail? A great Open Source email system, especially for LAMP/MySql administrators

    A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about how I may build an advanced search utility for my own email archive. One way to make complex queries on the archive seemed to be to put it all into a relational database. Since the Dbmail system stores email in that way, I asked its developers and Harald Reindl (an email administrator at The Lounge who already uses Dbmail: I found him in the PostFix Mailing list archives) if Dbmail could be used in that way.