[drupal-docs] Need another brain to edit How to Upgrade a Drupal Site

[Richard Eriksson]

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 11:36:57 -0800, Kieran Lal
<kieran at civicspacelabs.org> wrote:
> Hi, I have spent a lot of time trying to write documentation on how to
> upgrade a Drupal/CivicSpace site.  The documentation is definitely a
> rough draft.
> 
> http://dev.bryght.com/t/wiki/CivicSpaceUpgrade

I've made some changes, mostly formatting and minor clarifications.  

As I'm reading it, though, I wondered what the audience was.  People
who are not Unix administrators will not understand what the shell
script is doing and how to use sed and diff and ln and what all the
MySQL commands do.  An upgrade process needs to be simplified so that
people who understand the basics of FTP, the basics of creating and
copying a MySQL site involve and what a staging site is can do it. 
So, stripped down to its essentials, upgrading a site involve these
steps:

0. announce in advance that the site will be down to upgrade the code
and how long that's expected to take
1. backup the database and files
2. download the latest version of CivicSpace or Drupal
3. unzip the file and upload it to your site
4. run the upgrade script (possibly adding MySQL tables)
5. enable modules and set permissions and settings as necessary for
new functionality
6. test as an administrator and as actual user of the site to see if
they have the same functionality or the added functionality that the
administrator has given them

I imagine a lot of people will skip step #1 because that's fairly time
consuming if they're doing it over FTP.  Creating and maintaining a
staging site is ideal, but probably not worth the extra time if
you're, say, the administrator of a county-level political party
website.  Each of the steps I outlined above have sub-steps, yes, but
as written the upgrade process seems needlessly complex.

-- 
Richard Eriksson
Bryght Community Support
http://support.bryght.com/