I read on Drupal.org that if I wasn't at Drupal 5.5 I should upgrade, as it fixed a "critical problem". DrupNewb was at Drupal 5.3. (Gasp!!!) I'm not sure that this critical problem would really have affected DrupNewb.com, but I certainly wanted to try out a Drupal upgrade.

I'll give a brief recount of some of what I did, but please follow the official Drupal 5.5 UPGRADE.txt instructions if you are doing this upgrade, as I am not covering all of what you need to do.

First I downloaded Drupal 5.5, which is a big file named drupal-5.5.tar.gz. I unzipped this file with winzip and mostly followed the instructions found in UPGRADE.txt.

You do need to back up your db and your "files" and "site" directories. This is probably a good idea to do on a regular basis anyway, as with these you can recreate your Drupal site no matter what happens to your server. I backed up my MySQL database using PHPMyAdmin. I backed up my entire files and sites directory with WS_FTP95.

You then need to sign into your site as USER ID 1, and bring your site offline. I had come across the page to bring my site offline a few times in the past, but had to hunt for it. It is at Home » Administer » Site configuration » Site Maintenance.

The instructions say that you should then delete everything in your Drupal directory, and reinstall them. As I was using WS_FTP95, which will not delete a directory with anything in it, I didn't delete all of my directories - I just overwrote everything with the new files. This is probably a dangerous practice, as there may be files in the old version that you don't want to be in the new install. I think the file manager found in cpanel can delete whole directories, so I probably should have done that. You then restore your files and sites directories. Since I was lazy in not deleting the old directories, I didn't need to do this. Honestly, I'm not sure why you would ever need to delete and recreate the "files" directory, as that is not part of the Drupal install, but is only files which you have uploaded.

I didn't mention this, but pretty early in the process the install instructions said that I should go into Home » Administer » Site building » Modules and disable all of your modules. I didn't do this. If I had, after installing the new version of Drupal core I would have uploaded all of my add on modules in "sites/all", and then Enabled each of my add ons. I think this is partly to be sure the add ons will work with the new version of Drupal. This is definitely something necessary for a major upgrade (like to Drupal 6.0), where version would be a serious issue for modules. Seems like this didn't hurt me, so maybe I got lucky.

Once I did that I ran update.php, which did a bunch of stuff to the tables.

Finally, I went to Home » Administer » Site configuration » Site Maintenance put DrupNewb back online.

Not too bad a process, but there is a lot of reinstalling to to, so I wouldn't want to do this very often.