Last week I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my Drupal site to 4.7. I know! I know! It's been out for a while why did I wait to update to the new goodness? Comment Spam and lots of it. I was waiting for the spam module to be updated for 4.7 and I was planning on doing the update as soon as it was ready but life happened so last week was the first chance I had.
To figure out a good upgrade strategy I found Matt Westgate of Lullabot posted a great video on upgrading your Drupal install to 4.7. Also the Drupal website has a good hand book devoted to upgrading from previous versions.
In particular my upgrade steps were:
- Backup mysql database
- Log in a User 1 (the first user that you created for your drupal site is the administrator)
- Disable all contributed modules and custom themes
- Backup your whole 4.6 directory on your web server
- Remove 4.6 files and directories on your web server(this avoids having leftover files from 4.6 when you copy the 4.7 directory)
- Copy 4.7 files and directories to your web server
- Copy your files directory from the backup of your 4.6 directory into the 4.7 directory
- Copy your config.php file from the backup of your 4.6 directory into the 4.7 directory (It's stored in the Sites directory
- Copy your .htaccess (and robots.txt if you had one) from the backup of your 4.6 directory into the 4.7 directory
- Open your browser to www.yoursite.com/update.php (substitute www.yoursite.com with your url)
- Follow the directions on that page to update your db (you backed up your db right??)
- Now you are done the heavy lifting. You can download and install updates of any contributed modules you need/want from drupal.org (don't forget to enable them)
- Copy in any custom themes to the 4.7 theme directory and enable them
- The menu system has had an overhaul from 4.6 so you most likely will have to go in and tweak your menus a bit
- Don't forget to look over and change your Access Control settings after the update and after you install all the contributed modules
- If you use Cron for periodic Drupal tasks don't forget to edit the appropriate cron file in the scripts folder of your 4.7 directory
Wheh! I think that's pretty much it. Hopefully your upgrade will go nice and smooth. Oh if you had an XTemplate theme you will need to install the XTemplate theme engine as Drupal has now switched over completely to phpTemplate. (If you have no idea what that means then you are probably okay).
My upgrade went fairly smoothly. I have a mirror install of this site on my laptop so I was able to do some upgrade tests before taking the plunge and worked out most of the snags. My personal site however had a snag that had me scratching my head for a bit. Anonymous users couldn't see any content posted but rather saw the first message drupal displays when you install a brand new site. Hmm. Strange. I searched Drupal.org and found this post from a user that had the exact same problem. He wasn't alone it seems a few others were having the same issue and one of the posters said they fixed the issue by installing the Simple.Access module.
Note:You can download the 4.7 version here.
Anyways, this made a light bulb go off in my head as to what was happening and I posted this comment to the thread on Drupal.org:
Good upgrade but keep getting first user screen
I had this same problem and figured out that it was because I was using a module that sets access control on nodes (in my case it was organic groups) but when I upgraded I no longer needed this module so I didn't bother upgrading/enabling it. But if you aren't going to use the module you need to clear the node access information on the nodes otherwise nodes will not be visible to anonymous users...hence the start screen that is showing.
This is my guess as to what's happening but I'm not sure as I haven't dug too deeply into it. Someone else could verify this.
To fix this issue: I installed the Simple.Access module and then enabled it (as the module specifies) and then disabled it using the admin/access/simple_access/setup page. Disabling the module will clear all the node access information so all the nodes are visible again.
Since I no longer desired the node access control this worked well for me.
Hope this helps!
So if anyone else is in this situation hopefully this will help them out.
By the way, if you notice any problem with this site please let me know. Thanks! And sorry if my RSS feed has been duplicating the last few days. Hopefully it's resolved now. It seemed to be a glitch from updating.
If you are interested to know some of the differences from 4.6 to 4.7 click here.