Upgrading 6.1 to 6.2 if you've used Fantastico

During the last month I set up my first Drupal site using Drupal 6.1, and I was so impressed with how easy it was I then converted another couple of my sites to Drupal. I used Fantastico (yes. I know) but everything was fine. I'd just finished when along came Drupal 6.2!

Fantastico was still showing 6.1.

I'd read all the stuff I could find about upgrading, including upgrade.txt, drupal.org/upgrade, and various forum posts. Whilst I was worried about security issues, I was also worried about not upgrading properly and losing my sites!

Most of the advice about upgrading assumes that you’ve not installed via Fantastico, so I thought I’d explain exactly how I upgraded my site.

Because my site was so new, I was only using standard modules and themes.

1. Set my site to offline mode: (Administer > Site configuration > Site maintenance, set to Off-line and save configuration)

2. Backup my MySQL Database to my desktop (using cPanel, by clicking on ‘phpMyAdmin’, then ‘export’)

3. Backup my whole website to my desktop (using cPanel,by clicking on ‘Backup Wizard’, then ‘Home Directory’)

4. From the Drupal site (not via Fantastico) download Drupal 6.2 to my desktop.

5. Find the ‘sites’ folder on my desktop that had previously been saved from Drupal 6.1, and copy it to the Drupal 6.2 file, replacing the new ‘sites’ file with my original one.

6. Because my site was new I hadn’t uploaded any files so had no ‘files’ folder. If I had, I’d have also swapped the ‘files’ folder in the same way that I swapped the above ‘sites’ folder.

7. Check the old and new .htaccess and robots.txt files (They were identical. If they hadn’t been I’d have changed them)

8. FTP all the 6.2 files to replace the existing 6.1 files on my server. (I had a problem here. Whilst the 'sites' file had a permission of 0755, some of the files inside the 'sites' file had permissions of 0644, 0444, 0644, 0544 etc. I had to change the permissions of the server files to 0755 to allow the ‘sites’ file to ftp. After the ftp I had to change the permissions back to what they had previously been.).

9. Run update.php (www.example.com/update.php)

10. Return site to online mode (Administer > Site configuration > Site maintenance, set to On-line and save configuration)