D7 : Upgrading your Drupal Core...

Well this is a topic that is very scary... it took me a lot of guts to upgrade my core without loosing the so many articles, in my case Drupal learning notes, that I had written... being a newbie, they were even more precious...

Coming back to the issue, there are only three things we add to the Drupal installation and this is all we need to take care of when we upgrade the Core. And these three things are:

1. The things that we add to the sites/all directory. 
• These are things in it's sub-directories, such as /libraries, /modules, /themes and /files. 
• Anything else you add also needs to be included. Other sites if you are doing a multisite Drupal deployment.
• All of these things need to copied and backed up for the upgrade. 
• After the upgrade, and we will see shortly how, we will paste all these files to the same folder again.
2. All the content that we add and that is stored in the database. There are 2 ways of achieving this. One is using the PHPMYADMIN webapp for managing the MySQL DB. And the second method is using the BACKUP_MIGRATE module of Drupal. Either ways, we back up all the relevant tables in the Drupal installation and restore the database after the upgrade.
3. The .HTACCESS file. There may be a two of them. One on the root folder of the Apache webserver and the second in the root folder of Drupal. Both of these need to be backed-up and restored in their original folders after the upgrade.

Now the pre-requisites to take care of before undertaking the above steps:

1. Always put your website in the maintenance mode before any upgrade steps.

Restoration is simple... just reverse the process above... and add one step at the top...

1. Download the new Drupal core from www.drupal.org and upzip the folder. In the new folder, delete the /Sites directory. And replace the new .htaccess file with the old .htaccess file at the correct places. One in the root folder of the webserver and the other in the root folder of the Drupal install.
2. Now copy all the new Drupal files into the folder where the older Drupal files resided before.
3. Go to the home page of your Drupal install and type update.php at the end of the URL.
4. Run the update script. It will instruct us to all of the above steps that we have already done.
5. Once done, let the script update the Database. If needed, use the backup_migrate module to restore the Database.
6. Well this should have your site up and running on the new core. We can always go to the /reports/status.php and see the upgraded status.

Do let me know your feedback and if you liked this posting. Thanks for reading and your time.