A former co-worker of mine convinced me not to use WordPress when I set up my Web site back in...oh, I don't even know. Probably in 2011 or 2012 or so. Why? Because--at least at that time--WordPress sites were notoriously easy to hack and exploit. Drupal seemed to be a bit more secure, so I went with Drupal 7, which was the latest version at the time.
Mind you, yyrgames.com was looking pretty old in 2024. It didn't look good on mobile devices AT ALL, and somewhere over the last decade, mobile devices overtook desktops as the most popular way to browse the Web. But even on desktop, it looked old. It was definitely due for a redesign. What ultimately was the catalyst, though, was the Drupal 7 end-of-life announcement: the promise that once the drop-dead date arrived, there'd be no more updates...in other words, no more security patches. The date was first announced for November 2022, then extended to November 2023, and finally extended once more to January 5th, 2025. As in, three days prior to me writing this. So here I am racing to finish Super Duper Multitasking and its F2P cousin, Super Multitasking GO!, as well as preparing for MAGFest and also trying to be a husband and father. And also sleeping a little bit. And I realized right around New Year's Day that I was out of time. I remember what happened the last time I ignored a security update. To remain on Drupal 7 would be...unwise.
Over this past summer, I already started putting together new versions of my Web sites. I was working on them bit by bit, mostly during lunch breaks at work (when I had time to take them, AND I wasn't desperate for a "real" break, so not super often). But they weren't ready yet. The biggest deal was, they were built with Drupal 9, which wasn't the current version, so they would still need to be upgraded again, to Drupal 10. The reason I had to do this was because Drupal 10 requires a newer version of PHP than Drupal 9, and upgrading my Web sites to that version would break my Drupal 7 sites. Too bad, time's up! What we have is going live now!
I put up a maintenance message, upgraded PHP, and then went ahead to try to upgrade my Drupal 9 sites to Drupal 10. Simple, right? NOAP! Little did I know that this process required Composer, a COMMAND-LINE utility that I'd never used before. To my shock and surprise, realizing that it was already installed on my host's server and figuring out how to use it only took me about 20 minutes. But then, it didn't work, and I had no idea why. Googling the error turned up a few results, but none of the solutions there worked for me. I was stuck.
AND THEN! Installatron rode in on a white horse. It's the app that installs apps for you. After very carefully checking the add-on modules I'd installed into my Drupal 9 sites and removing anything incompatible with Drupal 10, I was able to go to CPanel > Installatron, and basically tell it "upgrade this" and it did. It worked like a charm. An entire day's worth of time was gone, but I'd ditched Drupal 7 and lived to tell the tale.
I have a lot of missing images and my design is incomplete, plus there are some issues with the theme I'm using (I've contacted their support already), but it is what it is and I love it. I'll be filling in the blanks and adding new content over the coming months. Please look forward to it =)