Posted by startsimple on February 15, 2010 at 4:40pm
Quick survey question: does everyone really do all 14 steps when upgrading? What do most people skip, if any?
It would seem that 14 steps are a bit much for such a small upgrade. I have been using other products like mediawiki, wordpress, lussumoVanilla and none have such a complex upgrade process, most you just backup the database and replace the core files.
I have over 15 (individual) Drupal sites and upgrading would be an issue over the lifespan of 15 sites. Sample site at http://www.16x20.com
Cheers,
S
Comments
Upgrade tips
It sounds like the problem isn't actually upgrading, it's having to upgrade 15 different sites. If this is the case, consider using a multi-site architecture so that you only have to upgrade one instance of code http://drupal.org/getting-started/6/install/multi-site This way, your 15 sites can all share the same codebase.
The 14 steps in UPGRADE.txt are the safest way to upgrade.
This procedure (along with running update.php) is theoretically identical in Drupal.
Making use of command-line tools like source control (i.e. Subversion) and drush (http://drupal.org/project/drush) expedite the process.
Disabling all contrib modules/themes in the process of upgrading ensures that the upgrade can proceed without any potential problems from contrib. Whenever I upgrade I usually do it locally or on a dev server so I don't always disable contrib modules/themes. You (or your development team) can probably do the same if (1) you're not upgrading on a production server, (2) you're comfortable using the command-line, and (3) you don't mind the possibility of digging into mysql or parsing possible PHP errors manually.
Its optonal to disable contrib mods and themes
This is only a minor upgrade from 6.14 to 6.15. just backing up all the files and database is sufficient. I didn't even change the theme. just copied the sites folder to the newly extracted 6.15 (renamed the folder later) and ran update.php. Everything worked fine.