I just breathed a sigh of relief and patted myself on the back for being so dumb and yet oh so smart!
I blindly installed a whole lot of updated Drupal modules, captcha-5.x-2.1 being one of them. I normally am logged into my website all the time but today I logged out and was unable to log back in. Going to www.mywebsite.com/user returned a blank page, as did www.mywebsite.com/user/1. So my lovely website appear to be hosed. A spark of genius struck and I went through all my new modules and one by one disabled each of the 7 or so modules I had upgraded and saw it I could log back in. In the past I wised up and put all add on modules in a directory under modules call contrib. I simply went to conrib directory and did a mv mouduleName to moduleName.bak – this disables the module without going through the admin section of the website. I did this for each updated module and went back and reloaded the blank page to see if it fixed the problem.
Ok, so I shouldn’t of done a mass update without testing, my bad, but for the novice user this would be a show stopper. So novice user and somewhat more advanced user (me) wise up and learn from my mistakes and lessons:
- Always keep your add on modules in a separate directory, in my cast I call it contrib
- Install new modules one at a time and test – this includes logging in and out
- If you encounter problems and they surface after updating a module or two you can always temporarily rename a module’s directory to disable it
Now be careful out there!