Update

From time to time the Drake Team releases a new version of Drake CMS; the release dates are published on the official website some weeks before their actual happening.

There are mainly three methods to update your Drake CMS installation (Diff patches, overwrite patches and manual update); you are always encouraged to backup before updating because patches might corrupt your Drake CMS installation in case of failure.

Diff patches

Diff patches are patches which use the embedded PhpPatcher class to modify existing files and update them to the patched version; this process requires the original file to have the exact content of the version to which the patch applies. Diff patches can also come with full files which are copied without any specific destination version check.

The advantage of diff patches is that their packages usually have a lower filesize, but they also require more memory and execution time to be applied.

Diff patches are available through the online updates webservice and also through normal file releases service.

Overwrite patches

An overwrite patch is a patch which updates Drake CMS without checking the existance or content of the updated files.

When to use them?

You are invited to use overwrite patches (instead of diff patches) in the following cases:

Where to get them

Overwrite patches will always be available - side by side with diff patches - at the following address:

How to install them

In Drake CMS v0.4.0 you will have to reach the following URL in your Drake CMS installation:

/admin.php?com_option=patch&task=new

Since Drake CMS v0.4.1, they can be installed using the System -> Install patch menu item.

NOTE: overwrite patches should not be installed copying the raw package files into Drake CMS since they may contain (as diff patches do) an install script which must be executed before the patch application

Manual update

If you cannot install any type of patch, you can still update to the latest version running the following steps:

  1. in the admin backend, make a tarball backup using System -> Tarball backup -> New backup and be sure to set the following options: This way you will obtain a backup containing the non-core user data files and the SQL backup data; verify that the backup contains all the files you want to save from the below step
  2. erase your previous Drake CMS installation
  3. reinstall the latest Drake CMS (not using the patch file, but downloading the full install package)
  4. extract the backup file into the freshly installed Drake CMS
  5. in the admin backend, restore the SQL database snapshot using System -> Database -> Manage backups

Once done all the above steps you will have a working Drake CMS installation updated to the latest version.