The Auto Assign Role module of Drupal is designed to provide an automatic role assignment to newly created user accounts. It will also allow users to choose their own role if permitted by the Drupal site administrator. This module can also be used to provide paths that will trigger a specific user role when an account is created.

A new version of the Auto Assign Role module has been released so I updated my 6.x-1.11 version to 6.x-1.2.

Here are the steps in upgrading this module:

1. From the Linux/Unix console, download the new Auto Assign Role module from the Drupal.org website using the wget or fetch command.

$ wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/autoassignrole-6.x-1.2.tar.gz

2. Extract the autoassignrole-6.x-1.2.tar.gz file

$ tar xzvf autoassignrole-6.x-1.2.tar.gz

3. Backup the old Auto assign role module

$ mkdir autoassignrole-old

I have just successfully upgraded this site with a newer version of Drupal. Six days ago, I received an advisory from Drupal through e-mail to upgrade all sites running versions 5.x and 6.x to its latest versions 5.22 and 6.16.

These versions are maintenance releases which will immediately fix security vulnerabilities and some other issues filed through Drupal's bug tracking system.

This is my first time to perform core upgrade using update.php and the steps provided in the UPGRADE.txt file that comes with the Drupal package. The steps were easy to follow except that it does not provide more details on how to perform step 1 which is about how to backup your database and Drupal directory, especially your "sites" directory. I think that they have purposely leave the details behind since this is a platform specific step.