Introduction to upgrading
About every 9 to 12 months, a new major version of Drupal is released. In order to fix security issues and take advantage of many new features, upgrading your Drupal site to the latest version is recommended.
Upgrading your Drupal site involves four basic steps:
- Back up your existing site and database.
- Download and unzip the new Drupal files, and carefully review the information and instructions available in the file UPGRADE.txt (located in the root of your installation directory).
- Upload the new Drupal files to your server.
- Run the update.php script, which will update your database.
However, to make your update run as smoothly as possible, there are various preparations that experienced Drupal users do to guarantee the least frustrating upgrade and minimal interruption to their users. These best practices are represented in this full tutorial along with the basic steps.
NOTE: Before deciding to perform a major upgrade ( e.g. 4.6.5 to 4.7.11, or 4.7.11 to 5.7, or 5.7 to 6.2), you should check to see if the contributed modules you rely on have a compatible version for your planned Drupal upgrade. Old versions of modules will not run on an upgraded version of Drupal (e.g 5.7 modules do not work on a Drupal 6.x site). However, if you are updating your Drupal core version, rather than a full point upgrade, there is no need to check all your contributed modules for compatibility. They will still work just fine after a Drupal core point-version update. (e.g. 5.6 to 5.7, or 6.0 to 6.1)