Big corps are often so slow to upgrade that when they are finally forced to upgrade it's often costly, and generally I'm on the side of those that want to upgrade more often - take the pain in several small bruises rather than one big hemorrhage.

But this all depends on the software you are upgrading. I've just upgraded the Getahead website to the latest Drupal (web CMS) and the latest Pebble (blogging webapp), with 2 very different stories...

Pebble

I've been lazy with Pebble. I was on 1.7, so I've skipped 1.8 and 1.9 and gone straight to 2.0 (RC1). The upgrade instructions worked, mostly things were backwards compatible, and it was documented where it wasn't.

No complaints.

Drupal

On the other hand I upgraded from Drupal 4.6 to 4.7. Here's what broke:

• The upgrade process. I needed to write my own to get the pages into the new DB
• The wiki. the entire wiki module has gone. All your wiki posts must be upgraded
• Every page on the site. Drupal used to use <base ...> and stopped, so most links were broken
• Themes. The old engine is being put out to pasture, you can install a backport but for how long
• Themes (again). Virtually all the themes are <table> based not CSS based

If I hadn't been forced to upgrade by the horribly broken Postgres support that Drupal had in 4.6 then I would never have made it. But at last I can turn the Drupal cache on, and the site suddenly stops being a dog.

A good outcome that is quite nice is that my theme is now shared between Drupal and Pebble, so in theory, I can update the look across both apps by changing a single file.

On the other hand, a bad outcome is that you'll probably see all my old posts turn up again in your aggregator. Sorry. I don't think there is anything I can do about that.

So if you see anything being broken, please tell me [joe at getahead dot ltd dot uk]. Thanks.

Responses[3]

Posted by Joe Walker on 15 August 2006 05:10:31 BST #