Drupal Update Process

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  • Frank Hagan
    Senior Member
    • Mar 2004
    • 724

    Drupal Update Process

    I've been playing around with Drupal on one of my sites, and I like the admin side of things ... much easier to navigate and understand for me than Joomla. But its time for a security upgrade, and I can't believe what they want you to do to upgrade the site.

    If I'm reading it right, you are basically reinstalling the entire application after backing up the prior installation. It really needs to be automated like WordPress has done (and Simple Machines Forum, and ...)

    I think I'll bail on Drupal. An upgrade process that cumbersome will mean that my customers will delay upgrading, and in the process be more vulnerable to hacking attempts.
  • openbox
    Senior Member
    • Mar 2004
    • 238

    #2
    Drupal isn't really that difficult to upgrade. Take your site offline, backup your site (unless you feel daring), download and extract the new tarball in your Drupal root directory, overwriting existing files, run the upgrade script from the admin panel, and bring your site back online. Less than five minutes worth of effort. I've run a few small, low key sites with Drupal since 4.x and I've not had any problem with an upgrade.

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    • Frank Hagan
      Senior Member
      • Mar 2004
      • 724

      #3
      It wouldn't be a problem for me, but I know my customers won't do it. I now only recommend scripts that have "auto update" from within their control panel (SMF instead of phpBB, WordPress, etc.) Even then I have to make sure they click the button from time to time.

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      • openbox
        Senior Member
        • Mar 2004
        • 238

        #4
        Depending on the number of customers, you could always perform the upgrades yourself as a "value added" service. Also, I'm sure you wanted to keep your customers partitioned out for resource usage reasons, but you could consider a central Drupal installation hosting all of your customers' sites.

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        • ZYV
          Senior Member
          • Sep 2005
          • 315

          #5
          I don't use Drupal but I wouldn't consider what you described as a difficult upgrade procedure. It sounds much more sane than the SMF upgrades which are easy thanks to the one-click solution, but don't have no backup requirements whatsoever. I can't imagine myself using this stuff before I back the whole thing up manually (files & database) in case if something goes wrong.

          You know, this kind of "luxury ignorance" should have its limits. The upgrades should be carried out by a qualified professional sysadmin and it's his job to make sure that the the website is running latest and invulnerable software.

          I hate it when the clients don't understand that this kind of maintenance *requires* qualification and ask whether they can update the site themselves. Yes, everything can work out OK, but what's going to happen if something goes wrong (which is not uncommon)? Hire someone to fix it, when it might not be possible at all because they made no backups?

          Everybody understands why they need a driving license to drive a car, damnit! Still many people don't understand why you need to be a professional when it comes to servers and stuff which might be sometimes much more difficult than driving.

          And if the clients still don't seem understand it even after you explained them all of the above, just think about it - is it really all that tempting to work for the idiots?

          Comment

          • Frank Hagan
            Senior Member
            • Mar 2004
            • 724

            #6
            Originally posted by openbox
            Depending on the number of customers, you could always perform the upgrades yourself as a "value added" service. Also, I'm sure you wanted to keep your customers partitioned out for resource usage reasons, but you could consider a central Drupal installation hosting all of your customers' sites.
            That's what I do for the customers who can't seem to handle it, but there's a limit to the number of people I want to do that for.

            I've never had an auto-update process fail in SMF, but I suppose it could happen. In Wordpress, the auto-update process includes mySQL backups of the structure and data, downloading the backups locally, and backing out of the process if something strange happens. Its a pretty good system.

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