The Drupal content management system is one of my favorite tools for managing website content. I can’t fault the Drupal developers for upgrading their code, but it seems to happen much more often than with Joomla and WordPress.
So tonight I upgraded a few websites to Drupal 6.4. The process is a bit cumbersome, and only one third-party module broke. Here’s the sequence:
- Download the latest Drupal release and extract it to your local computer
- Backup your Drupal content database
- Log in as user 1 (the site superuser)
- Download everything in the /sites directory
- As the superuser, go to Administer, then Site Maintenance, and take the site offline
- Switch to a core theme
- Go to Administer, Modules and disable any non-core modules
- Remove all old files (but I usually don’t)
- Upload Drupal core files
- Upload your /sites directory
- Run update.php
- Check the site status report and correct any errors that appear
- Reset the theme to your normal theme
- Re-enable non-core modules
- Run update.php again
- Return the site to online mode
- Test the publicly viewable site
The upgrade process would not have taken very long this evening except the fckeditor module (a what-you-see-is-what-you-get visual editor) would not work. Seven times I tried and seven times it would not work correctly. Eventually, I just removed the module. I’ll try it again when it becomes more stable for the Drupal 6.x series.
Joomla also released an updated version for the 1.5 series. I ran out of time to implement it on one website, so I implemented a patch to mitigate the recently discovered vulnerability. That will have to do for a few days.
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