[support] Upgrading from 4.5.5 to 6.13

[Chris Johnson]

I did roughly the same migration for a small civic-action group's site
I maintain.  I had problems with large pieces of content in nodes
disappearing because of a subtle change some place in character set
handling.  The MySQL database software was not changed; the hosting
company was the same through out.

I also had some other problem (don't recall the specifics as it was
more than a year ago), which necessitated me redoing the entire chain
migration over.  Be sure you keep backups of each step along the way!

The upshot is that although in theory it should be very simple, you
may well hit unexpected snags.  Be prepared to have to spend many
extra hours fixing them.

Good luck.

..chris

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Bill Fitzgerald<bill at funnymonkey.com> wrote:
> Hello, Shai,
>
> In the interests of protecting both you and your client from the surprises
> that will likely be lurking within either the data, the hosting config, or
> the content, I would be very clear that your initial bid represents an
> estimate, but that the actual hours for the job can only really be known
> when you start interacting with the data (aka, doing the work).
>
> In some cases, we treat upgrades from older versions more like data
> migrations than upgrades. It depends on the job, and the amount of data, but
> sometimes that can be a useful context for the work.
>
> I would also ask what the client wants to gain from the upgrade. Do they
> just want to preserve the existing functionality within an updated codebase,
> or do they want to begin to leverage some of the architectural  improvements
> that are possible with D6 (like, for example, moving from Image to
> Filefield/Imagefield/CCK)?
>
> My .02.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bill
>
> Shai Gluskin wrote:
>>
>> Hi Gang,
>>
>> I'm bidding on a site upgrade which is currently running on Drupal 4.5.5.
>> The good (actually great) news is that there are no non-core modules running
>> except for the image module. I haven't had direct access to the db and the
>> node content page isn't filterable by content type in 4.5, out of the 1280
>> nodes, I believe that fewer than 50 are images.
>>
>> I figure I'd upgrade to the last 4.5 release which was 4.5.8, then to
>> 4.6.11, then to 4.7.11, 5.19, 6.13.
>>
>> The db is MySQL. There are 1280 nodes. There is one vocabulary with about
>> 130 terms. No important blocks. It's running a minimally customized version
>> of Bluemarine. But I'm throwing the theme out completely, anyway.
>>
>> Even though it is five upgrades, this looks like it will be simple. Am I
>> deluding myself? Are there any gotchas that I'm not seeing? Any advice,
>> especially about what I may not be thinking of, would be most appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Shai
>>
>>
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