Hour 7: Upgrade Site

There are basically two situations when you need to upgrade your sites:

• Upgrade modules: a Drupal site may have many contributed modules. When those modules have new versions, you should upgrade them. But you do not have to upgrade a module right after its new version is released. I do module upgrading once per month for this Symphony site.
• Upgrade Drupal core: when a new Drupal core is released, it is necessary to upgrade because the new core may contain security fixes.

Upgrade modules

Go to Admin  > Reports to check the update avaiable. To update a module to latest version, see the steps below:

Step 1: Download the latest version and unzip it.

Step 2: Go to admin/build/modules to disable old module.

Step 3: Delete the old module and replace it with the new on server.

Step 4: Goto http://www.example.com/update.php or http://www.example.com/test_site/update.php to run update.php file to update your database.

Upgrade Drupal core

The very first step to make any upgrade to your site is to backup. See our backup and migrate guide for more details. After that, these are instructions to upgrade Drupal core.

Step 1: Backup your existing site and database.

Step 2: Place the site in "off-line" mode (Administer  > Site configuration  > Site maintenance).

Step 3: Download and unzip the new Drupal files, and carefully review the information and instructions available in the file UPGRADE.txt (located in the root of your installation directory).

Step 4: Switch your site's theme to a default theme (Garland or Bluemarine), and disable all contributed or customized modules.

Step 5: Upload the new Drupal files to your server.

Step 6: Run the update.php script, which will update your database. (http://yoursitename.com/update.php)

Step 7: Re-enable your contributed modules and run update.php (http://yoursitename.com/update.php)

Step 8: Re-enable your theme and if necessary run update.php (http://yoursitename.com/update.php)

Final words

Congratulation! You have finish the "Master Drupal in 7 hours" course. As you can see, Drupal may not be difficult than you first thought.

There are some parts of this website which you can go next:

• Our free Drupal themes.
• Symphony community support forum.

We will continue update this course with more information. We hope to have comments from you.