Addressing the specific upgrade requirements of your site

I. Review unique steps for your site
Your site is unique like you. You might have special files or a special configuration. During your site upgrade it's important to keep notes about any special changes you made. More often than not when people have problems, it's because they forgot some special steps that are unique to their site. Keep track of these steps on a change board, which you can use in future upgrades.

II. Get additional features(modules)
Drupal comes with many features but your site may have special needs. You can get additional modules from the Drupal modules page. You must know which Drupal modules are compatible with your site (e.g. use the 4.7 version of a module with Drupal 4.7.x.) In Drupal 4.7 and greater your contributed modules will upgrade automatically with the core Drupal upgrade as long as you have the new version uploaded to the site before running update.php.

III. Convert your custom modules to the new version
You may have custom modules on your site. For information about upgrading your custom modules, see the upgrading section of the Drupal developer's handbook.

IV. Convert your custom theme to the new version
For information about upgrading your theme, see the upgrading section of the Drupal Theming Guide.

V. Manually configure special steps for your database
The update script is designed to automatically upgrade your database. However, from time to time there are steps which cannot be automated. These steps appear as commands at the bottom of your update.php report. There may also be special steps which are recommended or were found too late to be fixed by the update script.

We recommend you upgrade to the latest release which takes care of all known database issues at this time.