Happy Pixels

Upgrading Drupal websites from one major version to the next is painful. Most people solve the problem by sticking with the old version, and I've seen a lot of people give up after trying for many days. I've myself done a good amount of (successful) upgrades from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 in the past year and decided to share my experience and hopefully help some people get through with it. My presentation Upgrading Drupal takes a look at what issues make those upgrades so damn problematic and what solutions we can implement to solve them. I'll be giving the presentation for the third time at DrupalCamp Spain this coming week-end, and I proposed it as a session for DrupalCon SF (please vote!).

The two main problems with upgrades are complexity and time: a lot of operations need to be performed in a specific order within a short period of time to minimize downtime. Any solution that addresses these two problems will need to be automated, and the best way to do this that I found involved a VCS, drush and some minimal shell scripting. The presentation is about the WHY's, and this article is about the HOW's, with more implementation details that wouldn't fit well in a presentation.

There are a lot of options when moving from Subversion to a next-generation Version Control System, but Bazaar's ability to interact with a subversion repository can make the transition easy and painless. While it is possible to use the bzr command in a subversion checkout or use it to connect to a subversion repository, you sometimes want to completely move to Bazaar and stop using subversion at all. Here's how to do it.

I recently had to set up a web viewer for a bzr branch hosted on my ubuntu server and decided to go with loggerhead as it seems to be the most commonly used one. However, all the instructions I could find have been written before the inclusion of loggerhead in the ubuntu repositories, so here is an updated tutorial on how to install and configure loggerhead on ubuntu.