upgrades, upgrades..

I was happy running Drupal 4.6.x and gallery 2.0 with tinymce configured perfectly, so I was sailing smoothly.. but now and then used to think about upgrading to Drupal version 4.7 which is a re-write and compelling. The new feautures that was attractive was the multiple block regions and free tagging apart from many other feautures. So I decided to go for the upgrade. Wait a minute, it means hell, becasuse I must use corresponding 4.7 modules only, which means for the gallery also I should upgrade to 2.1. So first I should upgrade the gallery then drupal. Fair enough I checked the gallery update and it said to simply un-zip your new-version to your exisitng version and run the upgrade and you will have a html wizard doing the upgrade. They warned me to close all the sessions in the gallery. As usual I forgot it. So after taking the complete back-up I was set to go.

I unzipped the gallery 2.1 version and and ran the upgrade. Funny things started after that. It warned me of session restart (same headers were sent out errors). Actually the upgrade was a series of 6 steps. The first step was funny welcome and the second step was authentication. My program was looping from step 1 to 2 , then back to step 1 and so forth. I lost patience but was determined, did a smart search in gallery site and found in forums that you will have to comment the seesion restart line in Authenticate class. So i did that and ignored the other warnings and finally the upgrade went through and stopped in the modules. I was using gallery minimal to upgrade so the modules also has to be upgraded. So downloaded all the relevant modules and then finally gallery 2.1 upgrade was sucessful.

Here are the tips I give if you are doing this upgrade.

• Clear the sessions of your gallery. Log in and go the site admin/maintanence and remove all the sessions there.
• Verify the integrity of your file uploads. If you sucessfully uploaded all the files without errors, then your upgrade will be definitely smooth.
• if you face any error, just try to upload that particular resource again, it could solve your problem
• disable all the modules inside the gallery and after upgrade you can enable/upgrade one by one.
• Always search in the gallery forums and chances are that others are also facing the same issues and thier questions answered

After sucessful upgrade of gallery 2.1, drupal upgrade was a breeze and no issues of such. Installed the tinymce with no hassles and then I found another master piece of open source software. It is the lovely image chooser for gallery called g2image

I downloaded and configured g2image from tinymce and then for drupal in the drupals gallery module. Now I have the most sophisticated , lovely set up and now it is a breeze to choose the thumbnails from gallery to your drupal blog using the g2image image chooser.

So far the upgrades have paid off only because of my determination and patience and many times I would think of restoring the back up becasue of sometimes lack of documentaion as always with open source, but resisted and all the changes I did it from home waking up till 1.am in the morning patiently with the dial up connection...

So go for the upgrades, its worth...