How To Upgrade Drupal 6.16 to 6.17 Print

Drupal has recently released a maintenance update for Drupal 6 & we advise all clients utilising our Drupal hosting UK service to upgrade.

This is update 17 (6.17) for their popular Content Management System.

There are no security-related fixes in this release, but it is still advised that anyone running version 6.16 upgrade, as a number of bug fixes (55 in total) are taken into account.

This article gives a brief overview of bug fixes and the upgrade process from Drupal 6.16 to 6.17.

Fixes include:

• session cookie handling
• better processing of big XML-RPC payloads
• better PostgreSQL compatibility
• improved PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility
• improved Japanese support in the search module
• better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation
• improved logging for login failures

Upgrading Drupal is a bit more tricky than other CMS like Joomla.

An overview of the upgrade process follows.

1. Make a full site backup via your cPanel account and download it to your local computer. You should have at least a backup of the following:
   1. sites/default/files directory from backup
   2. sites/default/settings.php from backup
   3. .htaccess
   4. any other files you have installed (i.e. sites/all/modules, sites/all/themes, sites/all/libraries, scripts/, etc
2. Switch the site to 'offline' mode
3. Switch the administration theme back to the default
4. Turn off all non-core modules
5. Delete all your current Drupal installation files
6. Upload the new Drupal files.
7. Restore your custom files from the backup. This includes:
   1. sites/default/files directory from backup
   2. sites/default/settings.php from backup
   3. .htaccess
   4. any other files you have installed (i.e. sites/all/modules, sites/all/themes, sites/all/libraries, scripts/, etc
8. Login as the 'root' user (USER1)
9. Run the update.php script (http://www.example.com/update.php)
10. Remove the following files:
    1. /install.php
    2. /CHANGELOG.txt
    3. /INSTALL.txt
    4. /INSTALL.mysql.txt
    5. /INSTALL.pgsql.txt
    6. /LICENSE.txt
    7. /MAINTAINERS.txt
    8. /UPGRADE.txt
11. Enable your theme
12. Enable your modules
13. Put the site in 'online' mode

Done!

As I said, pretty complicated in comparison with other CMS upgrades, but as Drupal users know, it's worth the effort.

Much of the upgrade complexity comes about because Drupal is a very modular CMS, which allows its user's unrestrained expansion possibilities and many would say, is the best platform with regards to site customisation.