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By jonjonz on
We are librarians running an aging Drupal 5 system with the calendar module. Everything is ducky except that at busy times, the calendar locks, and any and all views on the system will only return the dreaded white screen. Non view pages display just fine.
Previous forum feedback has told us our only hope of a fix is to upgrade, so barring a lucky break and someone replies with a similar situation and fix I want to ask:
Can anyone point us to a good article, how-to or page that clearly documents how to upgrade our version 5 system up to the current?
Everything we have found about upgrading seems to assume you are upgrading from 1 and perhaps 2 previous versions plus. The upgrade process looks extremely daunting.
Is it destructive?
If we follow the official instructions, if anything goes wrong, will we be able to back out cleanly or are we looking at attempting to restore from backups.
Is there a way to duplicate our system for testing the upgrade process that anyone would recommend?
Is upgrading old systems like this problematic or does it usually go smooth?
Comments
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You must upgrade to each major version-- so first to 6, then to 7. You can't go straight to 7.
See the upgrade.txt instructions provided with the upgrade version as well as http://drupal.org/upgrade. I believe there are some videos in that documentation, but if not googling around should find them pretty easily.
Also, for the d7 upgrade see http://www.lullabot.com/articles/tales-d7-front
Migrate/Import to New 7 Install vs sequential upgrade
This page: http://drupal.org/upgrade recommends:
"However, if you have a complex Drupal 5 site that you would like to upgrade to Drupal 7, you may want to consider starting the code and configuration fresh in a new Drupal 7 installation, then importing content and users from Drupal 5 using Migrate or similar modules."
While I would not call our site complex, we do have a good bakers dozen or so of user contributed modules tacked on that we are quite happy with.
I am wondering however how this import would work, given the many custom modules. We know what modules we have, but we did not really document the order and date when they were installed. I guess I need to read up on the Migrate and similar modules, but if anyone has experience with this approach I would like to hear about it.
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That's actually a good option which I should have mentioned as well. The only thing is, it's been so long since I've used d5 I don't remember the modules available for exporting, lol. iirc, i think i used some combination of importexportapi and views_bonus the last time I did it. Also, you can easily export the users table via phpmysql, but content is quite a bit more complex.
Sorry that's not more helpful, but the other poster is quite right-- each upgrade is really pretty much unique to the site.
The absolute best way to do
The absolute best way to do this is to make a test copy of the site, and upgrade the copy, without touching the live site. If everything goes well, you can then switch the two sites so that the upgraded site becomes the live site. (A failed upgrade can be destructive, and there's no automatic downgrade.)
More info on backups and test sites here: http://drupal.org/node/770402
You'll find detailed info on upgrading here: http://drupal.org/upgrade
I haven't done all that many upgrades myself, so I can't say if it usually goes well or not.
(I was too slow, it seems, WorldFallz' reply wasn't there when I started typing :-)
Test Site Information
Thanks for the test site leads, that is the kind of thing we need to keep our comfort level ok when approaching this.
An upgrade from 5 to 7 is
An upgrade from 5 to 7 is unique to every site. That's why the documentation is scarce. If your site is based on Drupal core only, the upgrade is easy. Add in the handful of modules and a slough of data, it gets harder. Each module will have it own upgrade path (or might not even have an equivalent in the next major version). As an example, if your site is using views, then upgrading from View1 in D5 to Views2 in D6, is not as easy as dropping in the module and hitting update.php. You must convert each view one-by-one using the views convert tool. This is just one example of how challenging it can be (although converting the view isn't hard, just time consuming if you have a lot of views.)
We are just in the middle of doing a D5-7 update on what we would consider a very basic site and it has taken a couple of days for guys that know what they are doing.
You will most likely have to hire someone to do it for you.