By pcwick on
I have often seen it repeated on Drupal forums that one should disable contributed modules prior to upgrading a site. The handbook page for "Upgrading from Drupal 4.5 to 4.6.3" states that disabling contributed modules is the first thing to be done in the upgrade procedure. http://drupal.org/node/30699
Is it still the case that disabling contrib modules before upgrade is necessary, and if so, why?
Comments
As I understand it
it's not a requirement as such - just an approach that is a bit safer.
You could just replace the whole site and contrib modules in one go and it should just work (it has worked for me). But if some of those contrib modules were badly written and something was to go wrong, it would be a bit harder to repair. After all Drupal can't guarantee the quality of contrib modules.
Disabling the modules beforehand is just a lower risk approach and allows you to pin point any problematic modules, and is probably recommended for that reason.
But then again, upgrades should always be tested offline on a dev server before going anywhere near your production one. When you can do that, why not try the big bang approach first. If it fails, you'll only be falling back to the "disable the contrib modules" approach. Even if the big bang approach works on your dev server, you can still take the safer approach if you are nervous.
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Anton
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great. thank you.
great. thank you.
contrib modules
You should test updating contrib modules. Controb modules SHOULD provide a database update if they change the database going from something like 4.7 to 5.0. So, when you run update.php it would update the core and contrib database entries.
Granted, they is saying it was done right and well. Should always to a test first.
Oh, and I am making the assumption that you have also upgraded the modules just like you upgraded the core. Modules from previous versions of core won't work with the current version.
thanks
again