CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This Drupal module is working out good for our NPO. I am more familiar with Drupal than CiviCRM but that gap is closing. I initially set it up a few months ago, but we are just now getting around to use it seriously. I’m posting today with some of my experiences with CiviCRM and to get some questions answered. This should all be forum searchable as this thread progresses. Although I’ve only been lurking up till now, these forums and the excellent online docs have been invaluable, and have really helped me get as far as I have.

The Upgrade:
Due to a change on our shared hosting platform, we started getting 403 errors on certain pages. They recommended we completely upgrade Drupal and it’s modules to the current releases. We were running Drupal 6.15 and CiviCRM 3.0.3 … nothing very old.

I took the site Offline and proceeded to follow the Drupal 6.20 upgrade procedures as outlined in their included upgrade.txt. Be sure to backup all your databases and files first. After I got everything showing “green” in the Drupal status report, I proceeded to follow the online CiviCRM 3.3.1 upgrade doc.

The upgrade went well, and I was very happy to see the green Successful box at the end. Thankfully, the 403 errors went away on the pages in question.

Minor Problems after Upgrade:
1. With the particular theme we are using, the top black menu appeared, but nothing was clickable. With Garland theme loaded, it worked fine.
2. There is a gray “Create New” button “floating” in the Left SideBar and shifting the “Recent Items” Block desc. text
3. When viewing my 2 Smart Groups, I got a strange error like something was missing from the DB. Other normal groups and everything else looked OK. The error was: Message htmlspecialchars() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given in /home/userdir/html/sites/all/modules/civicrm/packages/HTML/Common.php on line 144.


Solutions to Minor Problems:
1. I tried the CiviCRM Menu rebuild trick, but that didn’t help. What fixed it is that I went into Drupal/Admin/Performance and turned on “Optimize CSS”.
2. Looked around but couldn’t find a way to turn it off.
3. I went ahead and ran Drupal update.php one last time, but it didn’t help (or seem to have anything to do). The groups were small and I had a printout, so I just deleted them and recreated them. They seem to work properly now. I’ll have to see later if Contacts are automatically added to them as designed. Anyway, seems to be a possible glitch with the updater.

Questions
1. None on this. This theme is a little “tricked out” with SuckerFish menus. I’m just happy it works.
2. Does anyone know how to edit/hack away the “Create New” button? I really don’t need it.
3. Was there a better solution to this problem? I don’t think I missed an upgrade step. Next time, I might not have the luxury of deleting the Smart Groups and re-creating them. The idea that some of my DB data didn’t make it over is not comforting.

Thanks for your time.

Edit:
Just found out that my Mapping Provider settings for Google Map got erased. Easy fix but thought I should mention it.