I decided to do a much delayed upgrade to the website yesterday. It involved:
- Putting the site into maintanance mode
- Backing up the current site
- Backing up the database
- Disabling all the installed modules
- Removing any non-default content in the webserver directory
- Extracting the latest minor revision of the software and testing that
- Extracting the next major version at the latest minor revision and doing the same (if this had been multiple major revisions, this process would repeat until up to the latest major/minor)
- Copying back the couple of directories that had old settings
- Running a database upgrade script (as the database changes every so often)
- Looking for current versions of all the installed modules and installing them again
- Firing it up and hoping nothing changed
Well, things went great until I discovered that the calendar module doesn’t exist in the current major revision (only 12 minor revisions have come out since it was released and the next major is in beta).
Needless to say, after discovering this and looking at all the things that were broken, I decided to back out completely and will be looking at a new system (hopefully one with a calendar as a core component).
I’m considering Joomla! or Wordpress with appropriate modules. While I like Drupal, I find that upgrades are tedious. Geeklog was nice, other than the gaping security hole that forced me to change systems. It’s been over 2 years now and I should look at other systems. Who knows what’s been created in the past 2 years?
The only down side is that I can’t export the existing content and import it into anything. The reverse is possible, many modules exist to convert “Contect System X” to Drupal, but not the other way. This will be my 4th iteration of the website. I’m probably going to adopt the blue color scheme I used in the presentation last month for the website colors, as it appears to be popular and relatively easy on the eyes.
Comments welcome.