Drupal Updates, the Afterword

I've updated At Home on Spice Ridge and Pocahontas County History on the Web, and I've been asking myself, "What was all the fuss about, Boots?" It was much more trouble to set up test sites on localhost than it was to run the update processes on the live web sites. Of course, I see the point of having a test site, and I'm going to keep localhost up-to-date and backed up, so that next time I have a hardware disaster, I won't be starting from scratch.

I never got the Drupal image gallery modules and the enable clean urls functioning on localhost, but they never stopped working on the live sites, so there's not much pressure to fix the issue locally.

It seems that it's best to update modules one at a time, so that if there's a problem, you'll know which module caused it. Because I had both module updates and core updates, I updated the modules first, one at a time, and then did the core last.

Here's a list of the resources I used in the update process, with short descriptions.

• How to Upgrade Drupal from the O'Reilly Web site. This was much more helpful than the equivalent Drupal.org explanations, mostly because it was better written and edited. This is the link to go back to.
• HowTo: Updating Drupal 6.x to newer minor version. From the title, you'd think this Drupal.org guide would be exactly what you want when you're ready to update, but that's not the deal. It's a discussion of different tools that expedite the updating process, but you need to fuss with these long before you need to update. Frankly, I'm wondering whether these are worth the trouble...given how painless updating was. Of course, painless updates may be a fluke....
• Introduction to Upgrading. This seems to be Drupal.org's canonical upgrade instruction. It seemed pretty complete, but I didn't hit any snags, so I don't know whether it will help when one really needs help.
• update modules best practice--This is a nice discussion on a Drupal forum. I found it helpful in figuring out the sequence of my updates--that is, what to update first, second, third...