The New Media Lab provides several digital environments in which you can build your website. Our main server is used for production, meaning public-facing, sites but can also host sites used for testing and developing content. We also run an in-house development server. Because the Graduate Center’s firewall only allows access to it from within the building, it is generally a safe place to test new code and software before the same tools are deployed to your production site.
Building your initial site
Once you select and install the content management system or other platform on which you will build your site, we generally recommend creating your site on our production server. Even before your site is ready for the public, it can be helpful to view and to work on the site from outside the GC. If you are concerned about keeping your work in progress private, you can set your site to request search engines to not index it. WordPress.org provides instructions for WordPress sites, and a search for “robots.txt” helps explain how to set this up for other sites. If you’d like to further restrict access, NML staff can help you set a temporary site-wide password.
Updating your live site
We require that sites hosted on the NML server be kept reasonably up to date. However, once your site is live on the production server, you should be careful when making site-wide changes, such as updates to your theme, plugins, or CMS version. Most updates are improvements—and some are essential security upgrades—but any update can cause software incompatibilities or other problems. The more plugins or extensions your site uses, the more likely it is that updating one could cause incompatibilities with others. The plugin or extension admin pages of your CMS might include links to each plugin’s home page, but if it doesn’t, create a document to track the pages from which you download plugins. Check each page before upgrading your CMS. In most cases, if there will be an incompatibility, someone will have posted a warning, or the plugin itself will be updated to work with the new version of the CMS. We generally recommend backing up your site before running updates, but it’s also possible to test updates on a development server.
Testing on a development server
If downtime for your site would be a problem, you may want to test updates and other major changes on our development server. NML staff can help you to set up a development version of your site, a clone of your site content and settings on which you can make any changes without impacting your production site. The development server can also be a place to prepare content changes or new sections of your site.
Running update scripts and changing files
Many CMSs include tools to help automate updates. Because these tools have access to edit your code on the NML server, it is configured to require your login credentials to use these tools. If an update tool provides the opportunity to enter server information, you can use the tool by providing the same credentials used for software installation with FileZilla. You may need to specify that your access requires the SFTP or SSH2 protocol. Be careful where you provide your login information, though; only enter your server password when your connection to the NML server is secured by HTTPS (check your browser’s URL bar for “https” or a lock icon). You also can update files manually, though the same steps used for installing software.
If you need to make manual changes to your files, such as updating CSS documents to change the styling of a page, download the files using FileZilla, edit your local copy, and then upload the modified file.