Upgraded to Drupal 6
So, I finally got around to upgrading my personal blog to Drupal 6. This was my first Drupal site, started almost two years ago, as I remember it on Drupal 4.7 beta-something. It also has some content imported from my old Joomla! sites, and has gone through countless revisions.
A lot of modules have come and gone on this site, and there was a lot left to clean up, so it took a while. Flexinode, image.module, links.module, img_assist, all methods for doing stuff I used in the past, but I think I managed to get rid of most of the cruft. One of the most troublesome is the fact that I have a lot of input formats by now. Originally, I think I used TinyMCE. Then plain HTML. Then an extenal client to Blog API. Then Markdown. This is one of the messes I have yet to clean up, reformatting all my old content to use Markdown.
So with all this database cruft and past errors, I hit quite a few snags while upgrading. I'll have to spend some time figuring out whether it's just my crusty old database or bugs in the upgrade code.
Nevertheless, I'm very happy with the upgraded version, but there are a few outstanding issues:
- Typogrify is still MIA for Drupal 6. I miss it already. I'll have to see what I can do to help the porting effort.
- The gallery has been converted from image.module to CCK, Views, and ImageAPI/Cache/Field plus Thickbox. The basic stuff works, but I'd like to tweak it a bit more
- Converting all my content to Markdown.
- Sorting out whether my upgrade problems were bugs.
- Image block
Also, thanks to Sungsit Sawaiwan for creating the theme used here, Colourise.
And of course, tonnes of thanks to Dries and the Drupal community, in whose mighty company I shall not now feel ashamed. (since I now run my blog on Drupal 6 like a good Drupaller).
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Upgrading
Hi! Did you use any tutorial from drupal.org when upgrading? I'm planning to upgrade my site too and interested in bugs you encountered.
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Oh yeah, and while I was at
Oh yeah, and while I was at it, I converted the database to InnoDB. I considered upgrading to PostgreSQL, but last time I tried that, it was a lot of (painful) work.
There were also a lot of places where there can be stuff to clean out for old sites, like the blocks table, which in my case had grown to almost 900 rows from trying out dozens of themes over the years. A nice [HTML_REMOVED]DELETE FROM blocks WHERE theme != 'colourise';[HTML_REMOVED] took care of 856 of those. Neat.
There is of course the Drupal search index, which now accounts for ~27,512 rows out of the ~33,063 total rows in the database for this site. But that's a rant for another day :)
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Re: Upgrading
No, not really. I looked on some of the threads concerning conversion from image.module to something imagefield-based, but ended up doing it manually, since I wanted to clean up the file names anyways.
Otherwise, it was more or less a question of dumping the database, doing a bit of search and replace to get InnoDB instead of InnoDB, and then set up a sandbox-site somewhere with Drupal 6 and the updated modules and then run update.php against your database copy, and fix whatever issues might arise.
I think that it might go a lot easier if your site isn't as old and messed up as mine was, however, but the Drupal upgrade scripts tend to work fairly well. The main problem is if the modules you use do not have an equivalent Drupal 6 version.
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Oh yeah, I forgot to drop the
Oh yeah, I forgot to drop the link: How To: Migrate from Image.module to ImageField Documentation Project
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Thanks
Thanks for quick answer! My site is not that old, so if you telling me that drupal upgrade scripts works good, everything gonna be ok (and i don't use imagefield and image).
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Well, in my experience, the
Well, in my experience, the upgrade scripts of Drupal core are very thorough and solid. Contributed modules are very different when it comes to the quality of their upgrade scripts, but most are quite good.
The biggest problem is when one of the modules you are using are not ready for Drupal 6, or even worse, will not be updated for Drupal 6. That has been the main reason that I have hesitated to switch.
I have a long list of modules I use on this site, and many have been a long time coming, especially things related to Views and CCK, so updating has not seemed all that attractive until now.
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Just testing
This is just a test.