Update status: Monitor for new releases of modules
The update status module periodically checks for new versions of your site's software (including contributed modules and themes), and alerts you to available updates.
The log of available updates will indicate when new releases are ready for download, and you may configure various options, including frequency of update checking and notification options, at the Update status module settings page.
Please note that in order to provide this information, anonymous usage statistics (consisting of a unique key and a list of versions of the software your site is runnning) are sent to drupal.org. Please see the drupal.org privacy policy for more information. If desired, you may disable the Update status module from the module administration page.
Note: in Drupal version 5.x, this functionality is provided outside of Drupal core by the contributed Update status module.
Newbie Trap Updating Modules
To update to a new version of a module, I was renaming the old module directory instead of deleting it. That way, I thought, if something went wrong with the new module version I could restore the previous version (if the new module didn't modify the database).
This does not work. When I ran update.php, Drupal would keep using the older version of the module, even though the old module directory now had a different name.
To get Drupal to recognize and update to the new version of a module, the old module directory must be deleted or at least moved to a different parent directory.
How to un-update ?
I updated because of update stauts recommendations, and the result is that my site broke ... i'd need to restore to the previous version of the module, but i don't see the module anywhere available on drupal (at it's not the most up to date :-( ), and don't know how to restore it.
Stupidly, i thought that using the backup utility of my webhosting would save all the website but actually it saved only files, not the database :-(
Can you help me to un-do the changes and get my website running again ?
localhost killer
if you're running drupal 6 on a localhost, disable this module. it'll slow your administration sites to ungodly amounts.
Runs on Cron
The majority of the work that Update Status does is handled by the cron (you have to run the cron manually to see what modules are out of date if you don't have the cron set up to run periodically).
So, please take the parent with a grain of salt. It seems like an issue specific to their configuration, not inherent to the module.
Nope
Unfortunately I can confirm that this is not the case.
After upgrading to 6.13 recently, I got either HTTP 500 errors or "Site off-line" pages at least half of the time I tried to access the site. Deactivating the Update Status module solved this problem.
This was on a live site as well.
if, like me,
if, like me, ?q=admin/build/modules just timed out and won't show up, just remove the goddamn update folder from the modules folder
There are a couple of ways to
There are a couple of ways to prevent this from happening, but not a lot to do after the fact. You may have to look at the install / update scripts in the module and figure it out from there.
You can get old module releases via "View all releases" or pulling from CVS if you know what version you had before.
Any time you update, you should try it on a testing site. If it works fine there, make a backup of both the files and DB and then update live.