I have just finished my first updates of Drupal and it went very smooth.
The only thing that was a bit annoying was the part about disabling and enabling non core modules. I had to go over the list four times, when disabling, as dependencies blocked disabling some modules until other modules had been disabled.
This got me to think that there must be an easier way to do this. What I came up with is, in my view, both a simple and elegant solution.
Simply add a "Drupal Core Upgrade/Update" option in the Site Maintenance configuration.
When setting the site to this status Drupal will do two things:
- Drupal disables all non core modules temporarily
- Drupal switch to a predefined core theme
Then I perform all the steps necessary for the upgrade/update and when done I change the Site maintenance option back to where it was.
I believe that for sites that utilise a lot of non core modules this will really help things and minimise the risk that I either miss to disable or enable modules.
Comments
Before I posted here, I
Before I posted here, I wrote a similar post in the upgrading forum on drupal.org and got a reply with a few links to good meat about this topic:
http://drupal.org/node/377730 contains a very good post from a newbie commenting every step in the upgrade process. He also suggest a similar solution as me when it comes to non core modules.
http://drupal.org/node/377816 is a survey post about how people update Drupal and it seems some does skip the disabling of non core modules. For some it seems to work, for others it doesn't.
Then we have the http://drupal.org/project/contrib_toggle which seems to do almost exactly what I want. It is however a contrib module and I would rather have this as a core feature in the site maintenance configuration as I suggest.
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/thomas
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/thomas
T: @tsvenson | S: tsvenson.com
I got similar idea wich would include all of those features...
I made about it forum post (http://drupal.org/node/717918) and i am sorry about posting about subject in several place. I hope discussion about topic would be in forums ;)
Basically it would be service (where you would subscribe) witch at this point of planning would do (atleast) following
Backup your own sites folder so you would be able to rollback several versions (that is goal atleast. this could cause issue what needs to be solved with content added/changed afterwards)
It would keep track of several versions of modules and it would figure out what versions you could upgrade without things breaking. Checking changed function names etc....
It would try to convert (if need) your custom hacks to fit changed function names and types. Basically if function isLoggedIn($user) has changed to LoggedIn($uname) it would change your hacks to fit those.
Sandboxed preview of what your site would look and work like after upgrade of core and modules, so you can see by eyes also if it's going to broke.
Fully automated updates (prob for minor module and core upgrades only)
Please come and share your ideas and feedback. Especially i would like to heard if you would be ready to subscribe that kind of service.
Best regards
-Henri
why can't it just be automatic?
The other sites I run have WordPress and are always up to date. With Drupal, I have to set aside time to do it. Especially, for point releases and security fixes, why can't there just be a button to download and install the upgrade?
Not long ago, I finally upgraded 5.1 to 6.15 which took about half a day to get all the modules and everything. Then, a couple weeks later it is complaining that there is a security fix I need. So I did the backups and I'm ready to roll. But why can't it just be easy?