Mikkel Høgh

Coding the web since 1999

28 Dec 2008

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 Textile. Then plain again. Then, finally, 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).