Elteto.net

The ease of update to 6.3 just furthered my confidence in sticking with Drupal

I have been avoiding having to update to Drupal 6.3 for the last few days, fearing a complete breakdown of my site, but eventually backing up all the files with FileZilla and the database through the "Copy database to" function in phpMyAdmin (I cannot see how web MySQL administrators ever possibly survived without that tool). Downloading, extracting and uploading 6.3 to my site were all easy to do, and the UPGRADE.TXT file provided some easy-to-follow instructions.

Now, here is where I did a little experiment in laziness. I simply copied the settings, theme and module files in their respective directories in the new installation, changed "update_free_access" to TRUE in the settings.php file, and ran update.php, without disabling modules or putting my site in maintenance mode. Boy, was I surprised. My site popped right up, all its functions intact, with none of the settings changed. Of course, I must emphasize that this is in no way the prescribed method to update, regardless of whether it works or not. It did, however, strenthened my trust in and enthusiasm for Drupal. Furthermore, barely a few weeks after migrating to Drupal, I already noticed the popular CCK and Views modules updated for 6.X compatibility. While I understand some developer frustration with the Drop constantly moving, I am glad to see that the community is keeping up with the changes.