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

[Kieran Lal]

Richard, thank you for taking the time to edit.  These little details 
become difficult to see when you are immersed in the topic.

I interviewed a lot of CivicSpace site admins and what I kept hearing 
was that it took 10-20 hours to upgrade a CivicSpace site.  I set out 
to figure out why it was taking so long.  What I discovered was that a 
lot of people were just winging their upgrades.  They did not have time 
to think it through, and therefore they were getting stuck debugging 
their upgrade for the whole weekend.   Even people who have upgraded 
10-20 CivicSpace sites were just relying on recognizing the common 
errors rather than developing techniques to avoid these errors.  I 
expect that most admins would look at this and say it's ten steps too 
long.  But in reality if you don't go into a lot of detail you let 
novices get stuck a long the way.

Simple steps like "1. Backup the database and files" were full of pit 
falls and problems.  These apparently simple steps were horrendously 
difficult to debug and would cause many experienced people to just walk 
away.

I admit one of the reasons it is so complex, SED scripts for example, 
is that I was hoping to automate this process so it was as easy as the 
installer to upgrade your whole site.

I have a meeting tomorrow with the SpreadFirefox.com admin.   I am 
hoping he will get the chance to review the script and continue to help 
me make it more concise and clear.    In the long term, you are 
absolutely right, this script needs to be much shorter and simpler.  
But for now I am going set a clear technical audience, and keep the 
steps very detailed.  I hope many of the steps will eventually go away.

Cheers,
Kieran

On Mar 14, 2005, at 6:43 PM, Richard Eriksson wrote:

> 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/
> -- 
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>