Step-by-Step Instructions for Upgrading your Drupal 6.x Modules

Upgrading your Drupal 6.x modules is will not be the most painful step in the life of your Drupal website once you’ve done it once, but it’s a little bit tricky taking that first step.  Things can also go very wrong if you don’t follow the steps correctly.  So this is a very quick and straight forward guild to upgrading Drupal 6.x Modules.

1. Login with the user account that you created the site with, the super user.  Head to the modules section of your site and you should see a message like this if there are any available updates:

2.  Click on the Available Updates link and scroll down until you find the highlighted module that needs attention.

3.  Download the Recommended Release to your desktop or somewhere on your computer.

4.   Head back to the Modules section and uncheck (deactivating) the module in question.  Scroll down to the bottom and hit the save button.

5.  Now you will need a FTP client to upload your new files.  either with your hosting company or something like Filezilla will work, I use Coda.

6.  Find the new module we just downloaded to your computer and upload it to the modules folder of your website (replacing the existing module files).

7.  Go back to your admin area of your site and back to the modules page and make sure that it is now showing the newer version of the module (refresh the page if necessary).  Check the box beside the module, scroll to the bottom and hit the save btn.

8.  Very Important!  In your browser you need to run the update.php for your site to update the database of these changes to the Modules.  So run www.example.com/update.php and follow these steps:

A. press continue.

B.  We already made or selections so press Update!

C. Let the update run and if this all works like it should…

D.  You should see all green check marks!

Congratulations!  You have updated your Drupal 6 Modules!

The next step will be to update or Drupal Core installation which is a little bit more work and a few more steps.