Upgrading

Upgrading Drupal can be pretty complex and frustrating. You can follow the official Drupal tutorials or choose for automated approach. The presentation guides you through upgrading to another major version (so for example from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6) in the automated way. It uses version control system and drush (command line shell and Unix scripting interface for Drupal).

The main tips are:

• Make backups, often (of the Drupal files and DB)
• Make frequent updates (keep modules and Drupal versions up to date)
• Order matters! (some modules have dependencies so it’s important to install the modules in right order)
• Disable contact with web (especially out coming e-mails, but also registration and user content generation)
• Clean up (remove not used modules and files)

Slides: happypixels.net/blog/upgrading-drupal