This reduces chances of errors where consumers of strings mutate inputs
and reduces memory usage of the app.
Test suite passes now, but there may be some stuff left, so we will run
a few sites on a branch prior to merging
Several migrations were failing when running db:migrate at the initial release version from an empty database.
These changes took out statements that were causing migrations to fail, usually because of references to models that no longer exist.
Sam Saffron
Guo Xiang Tan
Vikhyat Korrapati
Chris Schetter
Robin Ward