[support] Upgrade to Drupal 5?

[Cary Gordon]

I don't think that this has been stated, so:

The key to making this as pain-free as possible is to create a  
separate site for your upgrade, then once everything is running  
swimmingly, you can cut over. At the time you cut over, you can load  
the latest data from your 4.7 DB and run update.php in 5.3. In other  
words: never upgrade a production site.

6 is imminent, however, if your site depends on contributed modules,  
there is no telling when, if ever, those will be released. I think  
that some of the sites we manage didn't switch to 5.x for four to six  
months. That said, the switch to 6, while not trivial, might be  
easier on module maintainers that the one from 4.7.

Likewise, the theming system is changing, but it also simplifies the  
theming process, so upgrading your themes will be work, but not too bad.

Thanks,

Cary

Cary Gordon
The Cherry Hill Company
http://www.chillco.com


On Oct 15, 2007, at 1:56 PM, Daniel Carrera 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.

>