So, you've created a Drupal site, customized a few bits here or there of Drupal core to satisy your client, and everyone's happy.

Then, a new security update is released. Suddenly those changes look in danger of being overwritten with the upgrade. What to do?

If your changes are just tweaks rather than a major rewrite, the following two-stage upgrade process has always worked well for me. You will need the original Drupal files of your currently installed version ('base'), and a copy of the new version files in another directory ('new'). You also need access to a copy of your production server Drupal files ('live').

Often when people hear about Drupal, they want to get things up and running as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, Drupal is not the most friendly package to getting running "out of the box".

While a lot of the installation wrinkles have been smoothed out with the recently released Drupal 5.0, here is my quick guide to getting Drupal 4.6.x installed. I still have a soft spot for this release, since it was a nice mix of features and simplicity. Some may find it useful, if only as a historical reference: