[support] Upgrade to Drupal 5?

[Larry Garfield]

Drupal 6.0 is in beta1 state right now, with beta2 expected "Real Soon Now".  A final release should probably be out before the end of the year, but no guarantees; the more people help fix bugs, the sooner it will be. :-)  New major releases come out roughly every 9-12 months, but it's not on a fixed schedule.  

The overall outline for migrating is fairly simple; any well-behaved module (which includes all of core) will upgrade your data for you so that you don't lose anything.

0. Backup. :-)

1. Make sure all of the modules and themes you use are upgraded.

2. Set up your new Drupal 5/6/whatever install.  Put the new modules and themes in it.  

3. Copy your old files directory to the new install, and point the new install at your database.

4. Run the update.php script to migrate all of your data.

5. Polish as needed.

The catch is that steps 1 and 5 could be trivial, or could be extensive.  It depends on what modules you use, how complex your theme is, and if you inadvertently coded yourself into a corner somewhere.  I know in my case, I took the opportunity during a 4.7->5 upgrade of a site to heavily refactor portions of the architecture (step 5).  That took a while, but is for the most part an optional step.

If you're only using stock modules and they're all upgraded (at this point pretty much anything that is going to be upgraded for Drupal 5 already has been), then it should be a fairly painless process.  

Cheers.

--Larry Garfield

On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:19:50 -0400, Allen Stern <allen at centernetworks.com> wrote:
> FYI - I moved my drupal site (www.centernetworks.com) from 4.7 to 5 last
> month - I was quite worried because I edited the core along with just
> tons of edits. I found the process to be painless and took about 3 hrs
> to get everything back the way I wanted it. Some tweaks to the template
> were the trickiest if I remember.
> 
> Just make sure you watch the upgrade video and back up everything!
> 
> -- Allen
> 
> Daniel Carrera wrote:
>> Oh, 6.0 is imminent? When is it due? Normally how frequent are new
> releases?
>>
>> Btw, thanks for the step-by-step. Very helpful. This is my first ever
>> migration.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Daniel.
>>
>> Ari Davidow wrote:
>>
>>> Working from memory (we're in the middle of planning a similar
> upgrade),
>>> this isn't necessarily very complicated.
>>>
>>> 1. Upgrade to the last 4.7 release--that's mostly security stuff and
>>> some minor (any?) table changes. You need to do that in all cases, even
>>> if you don't go on to 5.x (but you probably want 5.x soon, since 6.0 is
>>> imminent.)
>>> 2. Make sure that there are updates to all of the modules you need, or
>>> modules to which you can migrate, to meet your needs.
>>> 3. Upgrade to the current 5.x . (Is there an "upgrade to 5.0" step? I
>>> don't think so, but I could be wrong. You'll want to do this on a
>>> test/dev site first, as some themes are likely to break, depending on
>>> what you have customized how.
>>>
>>> There seems to be some decent documentation on the drupal.org
>>> <http://drupal.org> site. Look in the "tutorials" page of the
> "handbook"
>>> section. Here's a useful Introduction to Upgrading:
>>> http://drupal.org/upgrade/tutorial-introduction
>>>
>>> ari
>>> On 10/15/07, *Daniel Carrera* < daniel.carrera at zmsl.com
>>> <mailto:daniel.carrera at zmsl.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     Hello,
>>>
>>>     I have a production website that runs on Drupal 4.7. Should I move
> it to
>>>     Drupal 5.2?
>>>
>>>     I'm concerned that migrating might be difficult, might be work, or
> might
>>>     cause downtime for my users. On the other hand, I'm concerned about
>>>     staying with an old software version that might become unsupported
> in
>>>     the future, and that migration might be more difficult later.
>>>
>>>     My Drupal 4.7 site has several modules added on and I figure that
> these
>>>     might not all work in Drupal 5. My understanding is that backwards
>>>     compatibility is not a development goal for Drupal. So perhaps the
> best
>>>     way to "migrate" is to essentially re-do the website from scratch
> and
>>>     then copy all the content from the 4.7 site.
>>>
>>>     I'm generally happy with Drupal 4.7. Is there any page that briefly
>>>     explains what's new and exciting in Drupal 5 that might make one
>>>     want to
>>>     move to it?
>>>
>>>     Any help would be appreciated.
>>>
>>>     Cheers,
>>>     Daniel.
>>>     --
>>>     [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
> 
> --
> [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]