Upgrading Drupal Files

For ALL upgrades, it is advisable to first test the upgrade on a development version of your website and also to have a backup of the Drupal files and database before performing the upgrade, in case something untoward happens.

Upgrading Drupal core

One skill you’ll want to pick up at some point is how to keep everything up to date. Keeping your site up to date helps to ensure that you have the most efficient, secure and reliable version available. There are plenty of existing resources on how you should correctly upgrade your Drupal installation, which as long as you are doing a minor version upgrade (as opposed to a major version, e.g. from Drupal 6 to 7) is generally quite simple. See upgrading Drupal core for the official documentation.

Upgrading Drupal modules

For modules downloaded from Drupal.org, you can upgrade them by copying the files over then visiting the update.php path on your website. Review the Available updates report occasionally to look for modules which need to be upgraded. Read the official documentation on how to upgrade modules.

Upgrading Indicia modules

Because Indicia themes and modules are very specific and not really of interest to the rest of the Drupal community, they are kept along with the other Indicia code on the Downloads page site rather than on drupal.org. Therefore the update process is different.

You may also, on occasion, want to download a particular version directly from Github (the place used to hold all Indicia code). This allows you to access any copy of a module or theme including the latest development. If you visit Indicia Team on Github and select the repository of interest there is a “Clone or download” button which, by default, gets the latest release from the master branch. You can switch to the develop branch to get the latest development version.

There are several modules available for Indicia to integrate with both Drupal 6, 7 & 8. In all cases you need to download and unzip the module folder(s), then copy the folder(s) to your sites/all/modules folder on your webserver, using an FTP client or other file access if required to access the remote server. Although most updates will not require it, you should visit Drupal’s update.php path after installation in case there are any database schema updates required.