Drupal Interview Question:

How to handle upgrades in Drupal?

Submitted by: Muhammad

It's a fact of life that you'll have to upgrade your Drupal installation and contributed modules fairly frequently. Your candidate should mention:
► backing up the site,
► putting it into maintenance mode
► downloading the new version of the module
► uncompressing it
► running update.php
► testing the site
► taking the site out of maintenance mode
Ideally, your candidate would also mention creating a development environment to minimize downtime. There is also a big difference between upgrading a module (process described above) and a Drupal minor version upgrade, which requires more careful patching. Drupal major version upgrades, which happen every couple years, are another can of worms entirely.
Submitted by: Muhammad