WiredPea

It was time I upgraded my site to Drupal 7. How to do that, sure I had installed some sites on Drupal 7 from the beginning but I had never upgraded a Drupal 6 site.
So the first thing to do was find out how to do it, thus I started downloading Drupal 7. There was a file named upgrade.txt, well that is a good start. I read it, and thought: “Well this isn't too hard.”.

What had happened?

A client of mine was writing content on his website and he had a question. So I went to see and I noticed something odd in his html. He had a piece of text that he wanted to be strong and emphasized.

Let's say you have a website www.example.com and because of the great content you have put up there, people are starting to link to it.
That's fantastic I hear you say, or is it?
Because people are sloppy, so the link to example.com as well as www.example.com, so when search engines come by they will find example.com and www.example.com
But now you have another even bigger problem, because these search engines will think www.example.com and example.com are two different sites with the same content, and then you will have to wait and see which they will serve to your potential clients. Or worse, you get banned.

OOPS.
What to do now?

Say you want to change pages in your site.

No problem just change it, you say. But is that all?

• Think of all the pages linking to your current site. They all get a "404 page not found" error.
• Think of the search engines which will not produce the right results
• Think of your pagerank which will vanish instantly

The answer to all of these problems are redirects.

We all know that it is important to have good backups, but we also don't do that too often. So here is a little script you can dump is a cron job, and you will have your backups done automatically.

It is not that hard to make a backup, it is just one line like:
tar cvfz backup.tar.gz /path/to/webroot

Why is it than that most people don't do it?
Well I don't know about you, but I figure we just don't think about it.
So what can we do about it? We automate it !

Lets start......

You might have heard about drush, or be interested in drush. If not you should.
Drush stands for DRUpal SHell, and anyone who uses drupal seriously really should use it. This is because drush will allow you to install and update Drupal modules apt-get style. And it not only stops at installing and updating modules, it goes from installing Drupal to installing modules, to enabling and disabling modules.
So what do we need?
First of all Drupal, well you don't technically need that but you will probably want it.