After many months of neglect..I finally had some time to spare for my blog..When I started my blog I had just started Drupal..well It had been a while but I was still learning stuffs..I looked at my system status and found that most of my modules were in dire need of update including my Drupal Core which was based on Drupal 6.12, So I thought it would be a good time to do my update.

Step1. Initialize Git Repository

I was not sure how I should go about doing this. So the first thing I did was create a git reposioty. We have been using git for a while now and I think its a wonderful thing. So I first initialized a git repository on my webserver..and then pulled all the content from my Webserver to my local machine. I thought working on my local machine would be fast and easy and not to mention safe.

Step 2. Backup

Before you start the update process you have to backup everything. Just to be safe in case somthing goes wrong. For all my backup nees I use Backup and Migrate.

Step 3. Update Drupal Core

After getting all the files to my local server The first thing I did was update my drupal core. My installed version was 6.12 and the latest one was 6.14. The way I updated the core was replace all the folders except the sites folder with the files from the newer version and "Wah lah".

Step 4. Update the modules

The process of updating the module was a bit different. Most of my modules were in need of an update especially Panels and Views. I had Panels 2 installed and the latest release was panels 3. Panels 3 was better than panels 2 in so may ways, and also there was a new release of views  version 2.7. Now for updating the modules I use Drush. Now Drush is one of those cool things about Drupal. Its not a module. but u can use it to download and enable and disable modules and bunch of other cool stuffs from the command line.  So just with one command

- drush update

all my modules are updated to the latest release. Now isn't that cool or what?

Step 5. Be prepared for failures

Well not everything goes according to plan. After updating everything I encountered a problem, my comments were not showing..not to woory.I googled it and found a solution. I just need to run update.php. and it fixed the problem. Turned out there were a few changes in the comment table. So update.php took care of that.

Step 6. Finishing Touches

After updating all the modules and the core it felt like I had a fresh install..There were a few style changes that I wanted to make which I did...and also removed some modules which I didn't need. The biggest change that I did was remove my photos. Earlier I had to use host of modules which would pull all the photos from my flickr account and then create nodes from them. It was all great but it was really buggy and giving me lots of problems so I decided to remove that and just pull photos from flickr using the simple flickr module. It just links back to my flickr account which is not that bad.

So finally I have a fully updates sites..with the latest of all things nice..until the next update...Waiting for Drupal 7... :)