Upgrade to Drupal 6.2 complete

drupal

28 May, 2008 - 00:00

Nothing to see here. Move along.

JMB's blog

Comments

JMB Says:
31 May, 2008 - 10:00

Off the topic of Politics and the Local for a moment, some quick thoughts on the upgrade process.

I'm no Drupal expert, but I'll share a few notes on my experience of 5.x -> 6.2: The in-place upgrade didn't work for me. For some reason my settings.php file disagreed with the update process, so I had to start from a fresh PHP codebase, edit the settings.php file to insert the correct $db_url, then run the update script. And copy the "\files" directory back.

I had a few database update errors listed when adding modules - mainly warnings of duplicate entries - but nothing too troubling.

Google Analytics stopped working because I checked the wrong box on the module admin page.

The Views module seemed to choke during upgrade, but I don't need to use it now that the "All Time Popular Content" and "Last Viewed" blocks are available. I haven't investigated further. Things that I'm still fiddling with:

Open ID integration seems to be broken with many big providers. This seems to be a known issue looking at the support boards.
Open ID and CAPTCHA don't play well together, particularly using the RECAPTCHA plug-in.
TinyMCE integration for content editing was straightforward enough (ask me if you are getting problems) but I can't get it to work seamlessly for the comments. A user only gets a TinyMCE view when previewing their comment. Damned if I can work out why. I.e. if you comment on a post you get a textarea, but after you click preview you get the sam text in a full TinyMCE application. Editing an existing application also loads TinyMCE.
The Drupal buttons don't display properly - you need to fiddle about a bit to get them to show as options when creating your TinyMCE profile, but after they are selected there, I can't get them to display on the toolbar. Also, the Display/Hide Rich Text button that is talked about in the documentation is nowhere to be found. Probably my dodgy edits to plugin_reg.php.
Actions/Trigger is a new module which sounds good, but the "send email" action doesn't seem to work. Or at least if it's throwing an error I can't find it. (UPDATE: Aha - it was a chair/keyboard interface error).

Overall though, it's pretty damned impressive: much faster with reduced bandwidth usage. The module update checker is a life saver as well, particularly since I'm delving into the development tree for a lot of the modules.

Summary of module retirement: Action/Trigger (if I can get it working) replaces Notify; Views is superfluous for simple tasks; PathAuto now hangs off Token.

I also upgrade the website of the Rotary Club of Bristol. Again, I had to more or less start fresh, but module installation was reasonably fine. I'm using development releases of ACL and Forum Access and Events, with no ill effects so far. I did install Views as well, but without the same error messages as I got on this site. Very odd.

JMB

James Barlow