Reading Greg’s post on security upgrades and a few mentions of patches in the following discussion got me thinking about upgrade methods.

The standard Drupal method is to delete existing files and unpack a tarball to replace the old version - I find this method unappealing because: I keep my code in subversion so don’t want to delete the .svn subdirectories, and sometimes I have patches applied that I don’t want to loose.

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me

What I needed to do to get bluetooth audio working was to install the blueman package

The default configuration of varnish logs every request twice, once for the client and once for the backend communication

edit the line in /etc/init.d/varnishncsa to something like

To setup an IP based access control list so that only allowed users may access the site.

Installing Ubuntu on a new netbook proved remarkably easy once I got past a couple of hurdles

Quick function to delete a view.

This is basically what the UI form submit does.

I’ve found altering CCK node types as part of a fully scripted deployment phase to be quite challenging.

The best I’ve come up with is to use features for the main config changes and adding fields, but this won’t remove any fields - but CCK provides functions for this.

If you’ve ever tried to debug your update hooks via drush you may (like me) have been puzzled as to why your breakpoints don’t seem to work.

I’ve been looking into git for a while, the core toolset has been mature for ages but it just didn’t seem to have the wider support I wanted.

Now I look again and the egit plugin for eclipse has improved massively with full eclipse integration http://wiki.eclipse.org/EGit/User_Guide

Drupal update hooks can return info about queries run - and this is well documented.

If you want to return other informative messages about updates - just use the same format as returned by http://api.drupal.org/api/function/update_sql/6

<?php
array('success' => $result !== FALSE, 'query' => check_plain($sql));

?>

So you might have an update hook that looks like.