[support] Upgrading from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7

Fri May 11 12:32:47 UTC 2012

Earnie and All,

About three weeks ago I upgraded a 6 site site to 7.12 and it was a REAL
bear.

When Drupal runs into a problem during update.php it abandons the update
process. You aren't done until, either via drush or the UI on the
update.php screen you see that there are no more updates to perform.

I ran into all the issues that Earnie talked about. I actually started over
at one point when I found an issue which documented that when you clean out
all old node revisions so that the number of rows in the node table and the
number of rows in the the node_revisions table are the same, you
significantly reduce the errors. The module to help you with that is
revision_deletion <http://drupal.org/project/revision_deletion>. Here is a
long thread on: http://drupal.org/node/1176186

Some other sticking points I ran into:
Some CCK fields upgrade better than others. Leave yourself lots of time.
Here is just one example. I had a text field with a select list in which
the choices were say:

   - cat
      - dog
      - mouse

It wasn't a key|label thing. I guess implicitly the key and label were the
same. Using D7 CCK for upgrading that field, it was converted into the new
"List (text)" field type with the data structure of:

   - 1|cat
   - 2|dog
   - 3|mouse

which was fine.... for any new nodes created. But existing data was not
editable. Looking in the database, the labels were still present. CCK
converted the data structure but didn't go into the database to replace the
labels with the keys it had added. I was using that field as a views
argument and that was totally broken.

The solution was converting that field *while the site was still in D6* to
use a select list with the key|label (e.g. 1|cat) structure. Upon upgrade
it worked great. Of course, it is much more efficient if you know this
before you upgrade than after; this solution requires that you abandon your
current upgrade and start over.

*Imagecache*.

Abandon your presets and start over. I wasted A LOT of time trying to get
them to migrate and nothing worked. Save yourself some time and abandon
them. Even if you were to successfully migrate them, you'd still have to
reselect them in views that make use of them.

*Views.*

You need to go into every single display you have in every single view you
have and look for missing handlers or other errors. I'm forgetting the
details now, but at one point errors from a display that I wasn't using
caused problems. Sounds weird, I wish I had the details. I can tell you
that after I systematically went through every single display on every
single view and got rid of all the errors (typically by assigning an
existing handler to a missing one), a lot of problems went away. But think
prep: before you upgrade, go through your Views and delete what you don't
need.

The documentation for upgrading is weak. And that's not to mention that the
tools themselves for upgrading could be significantly improved. It's open
source, It's a drag, but I'm not blaming anyone. I could certainly help out
with the documentation and hope to do so after I finish a very overdue job
that I'm working on now (same job as described in this post).

Shai

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 7:44 AM, Earnie Boyd
<earnie at users.sourceforge.net>wrote:

> Ok, well, it still exists in 7.14. :(  I'll try to dig up the closed issue.
>
> Thanks,
> Earnie
>
> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Ms. Nancy Wichmann
> <nan_wich at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> > Earnie, that sounds like what 7.8 was supposed to fix. There was a long
> > issue on the core queue about it.
> >
> > Nancy
> > Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L.
> King,
> > Jr.
> >
> > ________________________________
> > From: Earnie Boyd <earnie at users.sourceforge.net>
> > To: support at drupal.org
> > Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 4:42 PM
> > Subject: Re: [support] Upgrading from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7
> >
> > On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 2:11 PM, Earnie Boyd
> > <earnie at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> >> I have noticed on a few occasions that when upgrading from Drupal 6 to
> >> Drupal 7 when running update.php things seem to go alright with the
> >> first update.php.  However, if you execute update.php again you'll
> >> have update items that did not complete and will not complete until
> >> you fix the code.  In particular there are some db_insert() queries
> >> that will fail due to duplicate entries for the data being inserted.
> >> I have found these in both modules/system/system.install and
> >> modules/block/block.install.  The simplest resolution to these is to
> >> modify those files and wrap the insert with a try {} catch() {} block
> >> similar to shown in the api documentation[1] except when you catch the
> >> event you need to continue on.
> >>
> >> [1]
> >>
> http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21database%21database.inc/group/database/7
> >>
> >
> > Another thing I find on occasion is an error indicating the 'language'
> > field in the node table doesn't have a default.  Going to the DB and
> > supplying a default resolves the issue but is that the correct thing
> > to do?  I do not have the locale module enabled so there is only the
> > default or undefined language.  I am at a loss at trying to find an
> > issue that might exist already for this at issues/drupal.  Does anyone
> > know of one that might be a good fit for this?
> >
> > --
> > Earnie
> > -- https://sites.google.com/site/earnieboyd
> > --
> > [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
> >
> >
> > --
> > [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>
>
>
> --
> Earnie
> -- https://sites.google.com/site/earnieboyd
> --
> [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>
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