Re: [Phpslash-devel] read-only mode

[Luis M <le...@ho...>]

>From: Joe Stewart <joe...@us...>
>On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 09:55:13PM -0400, Luis M wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > Is there a way to put phpslash 0.8 in read-only mode? If there is not, I
> > was thinking that would be a nice feature to have for 0.8...
> >
> > Maybe even make a few pages (or all) static while in read-only mode (for
> > administration/debugging purposes.
> >
>
>Can you explain a little more what you mean by "read-only mode"?

Sometimes i'm making changes to the server (or I switch servers for a few 
minutes until the next one reboots or whatever is doing). Essentially, I 
don't want the story counts to increase, people posting messages, vote 
counts to change, that sort of stuff...
I do want the page to be access in exactly the same way, but if a user tries 
to post something he/she would get a default "Server is in read-only mode 
and your changes won't get posted. Sorry for the inconvenience". Of course, 
the user would be echo whatever they try to post so that they can copy/paste 
it somewhere and put it whenever the page comes back from read-only mode.

SourceForge does something similar when they are going through maintenance 
(or when they are simply down because they can't handle the load).

I know there are a few things being incremented automatically, whether the 
site administrator wants it or not. I just don't know how many of those 
things would break if you tell the sql server to lock a database and put it 
in read-only mode :-) maybe phpslash would not work at all.

A list of items I think would need to change:

sessions
authentication
registration
story count(er)
polls
message posted by users to stories or polls
administrators adding news, blocks, or whatever else
rss blocks getting the latest .xml/.rdf/.rss from remote servers
...

As you see, there is a plethora of things that would need to be modified. 
Maybe the solution is simple and can be done now, but maybe not.

I mean, a simple: wget --mirror URL. Would probably do what I mean, but it's 
not nice since users might think that the site is having problems or that it 
sucks :-) (meaning things are broken).

The question is, "is it really necessary to put the whole site in 
read-only/admin/maintenance mode"?

I could find a few examples why this is a big yes.

What do you think it takes to make a phpslash behave like this?

----)(-----
Luis Mondesi
System Administrator
LatinoMixed.com

"We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you 
work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on" -- Steve Jobs in 
an interview for MacWorld Magazine 2004-Feb

No .doc: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.es.html