How To Upgrade Drupal 6.22 Print

It's that time again... Drupal.org have released their latest version of the Drupal 6 CMS system which should be of interest to anyone on our UK Drupal hosting service.

Although there doesn’t appear to be any security-related fixes from 6.21 to 6.22, we still advise everyone using our UK web hosting to update their Drupal 6 installations as a matter of course.

Any users running installations below 6.21 should upgrade as a matter of urgency, as some cross-site scripting security issues were fixed in that version.

Change Log

The change log for 6.22 lists the following:

• Made Drupal 6 work better with IIS and Internet Explorer.
• Fixed .po file imports to work better with custom textgroups.
• Improved code documentation at various places.
• Fixed a variety of other bugs.

Drupal Upgrade Procedure

The upgrade should be quite simple for most users:

1. Ensure all your custom and contributed modules are compatible with the latest version
2. Perform a full backup of your Drupal install (database and files)
3. Perform a backup of your /sites directory (i.e. compressed zip via cPanel)
4. Login to Drupal with the primary user account (user ID  1)
5. Place the site in Off-Line mode (Site Configuration -> Site Maintenance)
6. If using a custom theme, switch to a standard theme like Garland or Bluemarine (Site Building -> Themes)
7. Disable all your custom and contributed modules
8. Upload the new Drupal 6.22 compressed archive
9. Remove the old installation files (tip: if the Drupal installation is not in the root of your /public_html, rename the installation directory to something else, that way you can easily recover if something goes wrong. Once you are happy with the upgrade you can delete the renamed directory.)
10. Extract the new Drupal 6.22 compressed archive to the relevant location
11. Extract your /sites backup over the top of the new /sites directory
12. Manually verify your setting.php file/s
13. Run update.php (http://www.yourdrupalsite.com/update.php)
14. Re-enable your custom and contributed modules (Site Configuration -> Site Maintenance)
15. Return the site to your original theme (Site Building -> Themes)
16. Return your site to On-Line mode (Site Configuration -> Site Maintenance)