Procrastinate I did, and for a long time, but I bit the bullet today and upgraded my Drupal install. I had known that this was required a long time ago, as I had a suspicion that bots were attacking it. I do hate bots that attack me. It went well, all without drama. It was a minor upgrade.
I noticed odd things about my Drupal site’s URLs, which were changed from when I designed my mashup. All of a sudden there were external URLs appearing in them. That is odd. Or is it I am having a senior moment? My ISP was complaining that I was taking up too much CPU time on my shared service and recommended that I upgrade to a private service. This would have cost me double the monthly fee, and I felt it was unnecessary, as I really have very little updating.
I started with upgrading my non-core modules. These were easy, simply download and move into the proper folders. It all went well. I don’t really have many non-core modules anyway, and this helps.
I Googled and followed these instructions: HowTo: Updating Drupal 6.x to newer minor version. Backup, put site into maintenance node, turn off non-core modules, backup “sites” directory (some files I was not able to copy), then using my FTP client, overwrote everything but my “sites” folder, ran update.php, turned on my non-code modules, ran update.php again, turned the site back to production, and I was done.
Drama may be exciting on TV or in someone else’s life, but not for software upgrades. I will monitor for a couple of days before I do anything drastic. I still seek to kill errant bots…
