I see posts and workshops where people say, learn how to do your website yourself. I am all for someone learning how to code, learning HTML, learning CSS and SEO. However, if you think all this is simple, then you haven’t learned much. I’ve discovered that most difficult website challenges happen around the time of upgrades. This post will end with some common precautionary steps one should take in upgrading a CMS (content management system) software using one of the big three, WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal. I also note a few tales specific to those systems.

Recently, we upgraded a site at Rutgers from Joomla! 1.0 to Joomla! 1.5. When an upgrade this major is done, first it is done on a “play” copy of the site, called a sandbox. That way initial problems are discovered and fixed before going live. I encouraged my clients who use WordPress to do the same: do the initial upgrade on a copy of the site. Although at first I found few problems, as I went through our newly upgraded site, I noticed that the global settings had been changed. So there is a warning specific to Joomla!: check the global settings. We also had to change several modules related to playing videos, a photo gallery, and a slideshow. So I had to tweak specific files to get those to work again.

Some upgrades are small, and some are big. Last year I started working on a site that was done in Drupal 5. I discovered it was so much work to change that particular site (because a lot had been tweaked and tailored to the site) to Drupal 6 that the client and I decided it was a fine time to switch the entire site to WordPress. An upgrade from Drupal 6.2 to Drupal 6.3, on the other hand, would not have nearly been as dramatic.

Sometimes you can use upgrade time as a time to reassess how your site is done. Soon WordPress will release WordPress 3.0. You can read this post on Six Revisions to learn more about the new features. One of the new features is a new default theme. I am strongly considering using the new default theme for one of my sites instead of the current one, as the new default theme looks promising and has flexible options.

Here are a few basics steps in upgrading (can you think of others? feel free to say so in the comments):

1. Make a complete copy of your site and upgrade that one first. Look at it carefully to see what might have stopped working and what may need fixing.
2. Back up both your database AND your theme files. If for some reason your site doesn’t work after upgrading, try the default theme. Does that one work? Then something in your theme files needs fixing. Or consider switching themes. If you have tweaked your theme a lot, you may find you need to rework the theme to get the tweaks to work again.
3. Check the pages, the posts, the videos, photo galleries, the forms, and any other specialized feature you have added to your site.
4. Sometimes a plugin that worked before will not work with a new upgrade. Remember that you can delete a plugin by renaming the plugin folder (or deleted the plugin files) so it doesn’t get picked up by your CMS.
5. Permissions: I find this is more of an issue with Drupal or Joomla than with WordPress. Make sure the people that need to see a page can see it, and those who should not cannot.
6. Conflicting plugins: You may proceed to use your site for a while and then discover something that used to work no longer works. In one case with WordPress, for example, we had loaded two plugins that conflicted, so a page no longer sorted properly. We deleted the less useful plugin, and the problem was fixed.

Finally, if something does go wrong that you cannot fix, be aware that someone else may have had the problem. Search the web for a solution or ask on Twitter. If you don’t find an answer that way, try asking the question in a forum.

Do you have any upgrade tales?