Upgrading Drupal

Hello,

I'm developing an aplication for a publication with a lot of cck templates, cck fields... and I realize that all this changes affect to the database.

I'm wondering if there are good practices to passing drupal aplications from one environment to other, becasuse in the future, I'm sure that I will have to add new fields, quit others..

Thanks in advance.

I managed to update a site properly only to find that though I have no errors my custom content fields are missing (like highslide images and filefield insert). Not only are they missing from previously created content but also when I go to create new content. However my text and taxonomy are all still there. I didn't lose the nodes themselves.

I'd like to figure out where i went wrong and if there is a way to correct it? Fortunately I did backup the site and database beforehand, and I guess I could revert to the old site, (though I'm not dead sure how to do that.)

So I followed the procedure here:
1. Backed up database
2. Backed up the files.
3. Put site in maintenance mode
4. Changed from a contrib theme to garland
5. Uploaded Drupal 6.13 (from 6.12).
6. Replaced the Sites folder with my old one
7. Disabled Contributed modules
8. Ran update.php (no problems)

As I had modules needing updating, I next
9. Removed the out-of-date modules
10. Uploaded updated modules
11. Enabled the contributed modules
12. Ran Update.php again (no problems)
13. enabled theme
14. Put site back online.

In retrospect I guess I should have updated the modules first before updating the core? Meanwhile though, all my highslide images are missing, and when I go to "create content, Blog Entry" (that I had customized with CCK), the custom fields are missing.

I was upgrading from 6.5 to the latest version and every time I use the update.php for the actually upgrade or for mods I've been getting these errors below:

* warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #2 is not an array in /home/hpkmedia/public_html/affiliateherb/update.php on line 174.
* warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/hpkmedia/public_html/affiliateherb/update.php on line 338.

Updating a drupal install is painful. I split the pain into two axes:
1. updating modules / themes
2. updating the core
The first axis is now easily handled by drush - well done folks - magic stuff. This post is a set of ideas / plea for help for the second axis of pain ;-)

It is very sad. I have searched and Googled all around and not found a solution.

I upgraded from 5.x to 6.13. Well, when it was done, I had two problems, probably related.

First, two of my menus were duplicated. That is, everything in them appeared twice. I have partly addressed this issue by deleting the phantom menus in mySQL.

Second, many add-ins are missing from my admin menu. Webforms, Views, Gallery.

I regret that I did not take close note of the error messages (was it "menu routing table") during the transition, since those so often go away.

Please help me to find out.
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