January 26, 2009
Okay folks, we appear to be on the eve of the iLife launch so I want you to be fully aware of how the upgrade could totally and completely destroy the beautiful iWeb site you made with my theme :) How’s that for drama?
First, please consider subscribing to my blog to make sure you always have the latest announcements regarding theme upgrades. I’ll be rebuilding every theme to ensure they have the new code. When your theme is ready, you’ll want to know. Subscribing is the easiest way.
Subscribe via the RSS Feed
Subscribe via Email
Enter your email address to get new articles delivered to your inbox.
Now, because we have all been through this routine before, this time should be a breeze right? Good. So I’m going to recap the basics here and you’re going to pat yourself on the back for being clever.
Step 1: Burn Current Version of iWeb to DVD
There’s no way you can overwrite your current version of iWeb or your domain file when they’re safely stored on a DVD or CD. If you do not know where your domain file is, use Spotlight to search for it: domain or domain.sites. In the search results window, the “kind” of file will be listed as “iWeb Domain”.
Step 2: Purchase iLife 09
This is programmed in your DNA. No instructions necessary.
Step 3: Pre-Installation Procedure
As a secondary precaution, just before installation of iLife 09, move your existing version of iWeb OUT of the Applications folder. Move it anywhere you want, but do NOT leave it in the Applications folder. iLife is going to overwrite it if you do. You need to keep the old version if you intend to maintain your site while I rebuild the themes.
Next, duplicate your domain file and move the copy somewhere safe too. If the new version of iWeb behaves like the last upgrade did, when you first launch it, it will ask you if you’d like to upgrade your site and it will probably perform some kind of surgery that, after completion, will render the domain file unusuable in the older version of iWeb. Therefore, make sure you have your back-up and do not upgrade your only copy. Hopefully you burned a copy to DVD like I told you :-/
My suggestion to you, if you’re using one of my themes, is that you do NOT NOT NOT, upgrade your domain file. There’s no use in doing that because the entire site will be broken (more or less). Just start a new domain file if you want to play with the new version of iWeb.
Step 4: Run the iLife Installer
Pray you did not screw up steps 1-3 ;-)
Step 5: The Clever Step
Okay, you now have the new version of iWeb AND you should still have the old version of iWeb. Both *should* work. I would not move the old version back into your Apps folder however, because as I have the themes ready, the installer cannot have both versions in the same place. Run the old version of iWeb from its safe place outside the Apps folder. Continue to maintain your site from there. Play with the new version of iWeb all you want, but again, please be careful that you do not get excited and upgrade your domain without a back-up. You will lose the ability to maintain your site if you do, not to mention, you will have to rebuild every page ack.
Closing
Please ask questions if you are still unsure how to proceed. There’s a slim chance I will not have to rebuild the themes, but I’m fairly certain that chance is a fat chance. With that said however, I also have reason to believe that the rebuilds will go significantly faster this round and I may even be able to pop some of the fancy layouts BACK into the original themes like Aerolite and Zones! :) Cross your fingers.
Contact me or post a question below. Questions – GOOD. Losing your entire site – BAD.
About This Article
This entry was posted by Suzanne on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 10:17 PM and was filed in the Announcements category using the tags: iweb, upgrade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
In Case You Seek A Good Web Host
Aerolite for RapidWeaver Released
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG I just figured out how to make new custom page types :-O And this time they actually show up in the list of page types and they WORK!
Suzanne,
Does this mean that if I open the installer for one of my purchased themes which by the way I love! That I can open the color files and banners and replace them with new ones… then save it out and change the name and when I reinstall I can have my custom banner and layout at the top of all my new templates? This would cut back my work flow by about 50-60%
Ryan
Well THIS doesn’t mean that, but what you’re describing IS POSSIBLE! :) You don’t open the installer, you open the theme itself. Here’s the easiest way.
1.
Go to Finder and type SHIFT + COMMAND + G
2.
Paste this in there: /Applications/iWeb.app/Contents/Resources/Themes/theme.webtemplate/Shared/ where “theme.webtemplate” is the name of the theme you want to modify. For example: Aerolite Aqua.webtemplate.
3.
Click the GO button. If you get a message that the folder cannot be found, you typed the name of the theme incorrectly or you haven’t installed the theme yet :-/
4.
If the folder opens, you’re looking at the files for the theme/template. You can edit the images all you want but do NOT change the size or the file name.
Note that this will NOT update images on existing pages. You have to rebuild your pages to see the new images. This change only affects new pages built with the theme so if you have a 100 blog entries, ugh. Good luck :-/
I’m thinking whatever the gamma is they’re using isn’t compatible with the Mac… er something… On a Windows machine and on my iPhone, that red banner on that page matches the logo a LOT better than with Safari.
Or maybe they’re NOT adding gamma to the images so Safari is displaying them raw? I never wrapped my head around that stuff.. not really :)
BTW, great find on the new layout creation! Hot diggety!
Yeah I’ve had people ask about the color conversions twice in the last year. It’s rare, but in those two cases, the published sites had graphics that were not matching after publishing. I couldn’t explain it because if I published from my machine using the same theme, the graphics would be fine but when they publish using the theme, the shift would occur. The only thing I could get close to was that the monitor calibration tools or the hardware drivers were coming into play but that’s WAY beyond my knowledge.
This is a great string of comments, but a bit difficult for a newbie like myself to follow. Would you mind, Suzanne, summarizing these cool discoveries in another post/article? I think that your templates for iWeb are very appealing and easy to use, so you must be attracting more low-knowledge users like me.
Also, I am a bit confused about how to keep running the old iWeb 2 once you have moved the domain file. I haven’t got my new iLife yet, will take a while to get the package delivered to Vietnam . . . Maybe in a few weeks . . .
Hi Sherry – no worries, these guys in this conversation are some long-time iWeb fans. We do this from time to time.
Yes, I’ll summarize this stuff for you, in a new article. I’m going to do more tinkering on Wednesday and I think perhaps by end of day, I’ll be able to say for sure that there’s no worry about losing your site. If you went through the upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0, well that was a different story, but this time I think we’re going to be trouble-free.
So for you, I would just burn your domain file and your current copy of iWeb to a DVD just before you upgrade. Then install iLife 09. You can continue to manage your site as you have been using the new version. Right now it’s looking like you won’t have to keep iWeb 2 around. For the last upgrade, we had to keep 1.0 around to manage our sites because none of my templates worked after the upgrade. Once I had the templates rebuilt, you could then migrate to iWeb 2 but you had to rebuild your entire site using the new version. Looks like we avoided that with this one, but watch the blog for my final notes about that tomorrow.
I just purchased Aerolite 4 days ago and installed it in iweb 08 to play with it. I received and installed iweb 09 yesterday. I’m getting ready to build my photography site. Is it okay to re-install the Aerolite into iweb 09 and start building and uploading? Or should I wait? I’ve tried iweb 09 with the Aerolite template, and so far everything seems okay. If you do tweak the template, do I have anything to worry about. Thanks.
I figured the color thing out. I had to change the colosync profile of my monitor to one of the sRGB ones, THEN tell iWeb to publish. You’ll notice my images are a much richer tone of red (and match the logo!) It appears to have done this for ALL pages including Albums, so I’m happy :D
Dan, yes you’re okay. Install the theme to iWeb 09 and begin your site. As far as I know there will be no issue with that.
Ken that’s crazy! But once again, a great find. I’m going to have to tinker with that more myself.
Thanks for adding this page.
There was a slight moment of panic when i saw that my album menu pages didn’t have content and wouldn’t let me add any. I just exited without saving, installed the theme again, went back in and everything was back to normal apart from the fact that everything seems to want to be refreshed. I can live with that :)
Hi David – glad to hear that worked out okay :-/ I’m so glad the code in the domain file is not being altered this time around. What a nightmare that was last time. Everyone had to rebuild all their pages. I couldn’t control that, but it was not exactly a happy situation. Every report so far has been a success.
FYI, I’m going to pop a new comments template into my site here so for those of you following this thread, you may see some odd behavior on the page while I’m doing this.
WordPress now supports threaded comments which is pretty cool, but you have to insert the threading code to make it work.
Ken,
I think I saw your post on the apple forums as well… so do you think if your monitor is calibrated that it will take the calibration color as well. This will be very hard for me to remember every time I have to post a site to change my monitor color… there must be a work around for this. I publish 5-10 mini sites a day and this could really affect my work flow.. and I guess it has been already.
I noticed before that different browsers rendered color different and some of my pictures were looking off… I need to get this sorted and quick!
As near as I can figure from the posts I’ve found, the problem is that iWeb is NOT applying the sRGB colorspace. Even when I changed the colorspace manually, it still didn’t add it to the images, iWeb’s image engine just rendered the non sRGB’d images closer to what you saw on the screen. I really don’t think monitor calibration would help since one of the things iWeb SHOULD be doing, is not being done.
I’m guessing well see a .1 or .01 release to fix this eventually.
Suzanne, do you find we still have the same “html” coding issue, ala ShareThis or AddThis, with iWeb 09? (For the curious, we found the only way to add a ShareThis or AddThis button to an iWeb page was to add the button’s html code to the published iWeb page, not as an html snippet.)
Jon
Yep this still exists as far as I’m aware. I forgot how we did that. Did I give you the code for that? I know there was a piece on the page… oh right, the placeholder box and then adding the script into the HTML because you couldn’t see it otherwise. Yeah that continues unchanged for now. The guys who created that are WordPress guys. They probably don’t even know what iWeb is ;-)
Yes, we had to paste the button’s html code into iWeb’s published pages (used Text Edit). It works well, but makes iWeb’s publish to ftp site kind’a moot if we can’t add the text within iWeb. …j
Hmm… Interesting that the photo next to my name is of the director at the web site I added. Ha!
Your picture there shows up because the email address you specified when leaving your comment here, is tied to your Gravatar account ;-)
Weird. I never set up a Gravatar account, but now I have one. Thanks! …j
LOL another one of those late night parties and you wake up in the morning with a Gravatar (rolls eyes)
;-)
That must have been the reason! ;-)