In my new website infrastructure, I make heavy use of both Drupal and Gallery, both of which are PHP web applications, and by some definition of the term, both of which are content management systems.

The installation process for each is quite painless and, in a largely unheard of fashion for me (someone coming from the Java web-app world), both have graphical installers to guide you through the database creation process, as well as setting up the first mandatory users and content.

I’m so used to so many other applications that require you to tweak configuration files and set up various configurations that the process of installing these PHP applications is surprisingly user-friendly.

That being said, up until recently, both Drupal and Gallery have had a fairly cumbersome manual process behind them for upgrading (particularly the core). In both cases you have to wipe out the entire install (except, and this is important, the key bits that actually hold data not in the MySQL schema), and then you have to drop the new install in its place. After that, you replace your key data folders, and manually navigate to an update web-page which will run upgrade scripts for all the new modules of the core.

This process is error-prone, and I find it to be a barrier for me to want to upgrade (albeit a small one). At the same time, I’m always a fan of bleeding edge performance and features; so I typically find myself conflicted. In addition, in many cases security concerns mandate the need to upgrade, effectively creating a chore for me.

Drupal now has a very nice module called Update Status which takes a lot of the guesswork out of seeing which modules may have fallen behind.

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It also links to the download link directly so you can see what you need to pull down:

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It doesn’t help with the upgrade process however… at least yet.

Gallery on the other hand, recently had a 2.2 release, which at least according to the release notes, has a new download and upgrade feature built directly into the plug-in page. Ironically, I haven’t tried this new feature because to get to it… I have to upgrade first!

It seems to me that the next evolution (admittedly a tricky one) is to semi-automate this upgrade process for the ‘normal’ case - I realize some upgrades may require user intervention; but with the way these plug-in systems are built in both Drupal and Gallery, upgrades should theoretically be capable of automation in 95%+ of the cases.

This world doesn’t exist yet, but hopefully soon, at least for Drupal; I’ve learned that most Drupal module developers are very aggressive about releases, and I’m having trouble keeping up.