Hi folks,

I have a D6.9 site that I need to upgrade, so here is what I did.

It was part of a multisite install and I first wanted to split it out into a sandbox site as a stand-alone install. So I used some instructions I found on this site for copying a site, and that worked well. Basically I took all of /my/path/drupal-6.9 and copied it to /my/path/example.com, then I went into /my/path/example.com/sites and removed all the sites except the one I wanted. I renamed it to sandbox.example.com and updated the other things as per the article I found. e.g settings file, made copy of DB, and made a new apache config file for sandbox.example.com

So I had a stand-alone installation but it was using the sites directory in this probably unusual fashion.

And it worked great.

Then I went through the upgrade for 6.9 to 6.26. Followed the instructions to the tee and it went well. First updated the core, then my extra modules cck, path_redirect, and fckeditor. fckeditor did have an issue because I could not find a place where to download the latest version of fckeditor as per the instructions, so I just copied it from the 6.9 install. Though I did upgrade the D6 middleware code if you get what I mean.

Anyway, that all seemed to work fine too and the sandbox site was chugging along nicely.

Then I embarked upon the D7 upgrade. Followed the instructions to the tee but after running the update.php is when I had problems. There were no errors reported so I clicked the link for the administration ( http://sandbox.example.com/admin ) and all I get is a message

Administration

Array
Status message
Operating in maintenance mode. Go online.

I can't do anything at all because it just tells me that. When I click the "go online" link I just get :

Maintenance mode

Array

And I spent the last hour googling for info on this and tried a whole bunch of "fixes for being stuck in maintenance mode but none of them seem to work.

So I reverted to my backup of 6.26, confirmed it worked, and then tried it all again with the same results.

What is going on?

Help me obi-wan kenobi, you're my only hope!

Comments

john_b’s picture

You do not actually say you are logged in on the upgraded copy of the site. Maybe logging in at the /user page, then going to admin/config/development/maintenance is all it takes.

However...

Upgrading a Drupal major version if often a big headache even when you do everything by the book. It is hard to give specific advice (apart from avoiding the upgrade: many experienced Drupal people prefer to make a new site and import the content across). If you are accustomed to using command line, drush is a great help. It can among other things take the site out of maintenance mode http://drush.ws/#variable-set. Instructions for installing drush are here http://drupal.org/project/drush. It is hard to work on Drupal without it. A lot of this debugging can also be done direct on the database using a database gui like phpmyadmin. There is not so much a magic bullet as a set of Drupal skills which can resolve such things.

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors

stemcellboy’s picture

OK, so are there any import tools out there I can use?

This site is relatively small and static so doing it manually would not hurt too much, but if there is a tool to import existing pages that would be great

john_b’s picture

Migrate module.

If it is a small site it is probably faster to do it by hand. Drupal has a lot going for it. But in a year we will have Drupal 8 available.

Drupal core developers are well aware that major version upgrades are a problem in Drupal. It will not be fixed by Drupal 8. Maybe one day it will be fixed.

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors