By parc on

I just discovered that our website prisonactivist.org runs on drupal version 4.3
Would it make more sense to uninstall and do a clean installation of drupal 6.1, or would it be better to go through all of the upgrades? If so, do I have to upgrade to 4.7 and then 5.0, or can i go straight to 5.0 and then to 6.0?

Also, how can i know if the modules I have in 4.3 will still work in 6.1 and any of the versions inbetween?

thanks

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.5.x or older

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

It depends on how much content you have and how customized things are. Going from 4.3 to either 5.x or 6.x could me some of the modules used on the site are no longer supported. Personally I would goto 5.x or wait awhile if you want to go to 6.x.

I am in the process of upgrading a 4.7 site to 5.7 and because the amount of content is small and with the addition of CCK, Views and Panels 2 there where better (less custom) ways of implementing the sites features that an straight upgrade would allow. Instead it was decided to redo the site and hand copy the content over.

So you need to determine what approach makes the most sense for the site, and yes you need to go through multiple upgrades if you want to up grade.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

So, it's do-able in theory. In reality it depends on how much content you have. Upgrades before 4.7 are, more manual. between 4.4 and 4.5 there is a manual step that you will need to account for.

You would also need to consider retrieving the 4.4 -> 4.5 -> 4.6 versions from CVS if you want to update at each step of the way. Due tot he way the update.php was written in earlier versions you should be able to successfully go from 4.3 -> 4.4.x, perform the manual step to 4.5.x, then go straight to 4.7.x You _might_ be able to go straight to 5.x test site and backups all the way. As to contributed module, you'll have to research those. There are a wealth of solutions now, many that minimize or reduce the need for contributed modules in many cases.

At some point the URL paths changed so you will need to make sure Legacy module is turned on to honor old path names.

I would suggest looking at views at the least, cck might be of interest. For link, look at the directory module.

Read my sig... backups and test sites. Your site doesn't appear all that complicated or divergent from core, so you should be able to accomplish it for the bulk of your content. Then rather then worry about what modules you have, recreate those parts manually (unless you are a database whizz then it's just a matter of SQL commands Note, I am not a database whizz :).

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide