Ever seen footage of the Exxon Valdez dashed upon the shores of Prince William Sound? That's kind of what the wreckage from our experimental upgrade looked like. The seabirds of our data gasping for breath, the diverse marine life of our content types covered with tarry corruption. It was not a pretty sight (or site).
Has anyone done a successful upgrade from D5 to D6 with their data, content types, and views intact? If so, how did you do it and what instructions did you use?
In our case, it was an attempted upgrade from D5.10 to D6.4
We found many instructions, even on drupal.org (here only as a "screencast"), but none provided flawless migration. After the update.php, we had a list of errors that was longer than my arm. And after correcting the errors, neither the views nor the content types worked properly.
Wes
Comments
I keep getting fatal errors cck, locations, views
I have striped my 5.10 install down to the minimum to not lose my cck data, CCK, Locations, Views, pathauto. I have upgraded these modules to latest stable versions. I keep getting fatal errors during update to 6. I wish I would have written them down. I think one of them referred to location.views.
Hoping for Redemption
Hi Wes,
I'm helping upgrade www.cctv.org from D5 to D6. My Pegevent module that drives production scheduling, airtime display, etc. was fairly easy to upgrade once I reworked a few things. The views kinda came through largely mangled, but I managed to recover and rework them. I think the CCK migration was a lot of hand work. I'm working on trying to get the CCK types from 5 exported to 6 so they'll work in an install file and we can do a general release of our code base. Having some difficulties on this last piece.
I think there were so many changes that the D5 to D6 bump is hard to implement programatically. Hopefully the D6 to D7 transition is easier. If you're philosophically inclined, see http://drupal.org/node/311893 which discusses disparity of versions, etc.
Good luck to us all ;-)
--
Joe Golden
www.triangul.us : People, Ideas, Connections
From what I've heard it can
From what I've heard it can be extremely complicated to upgrade from D5 to D6 (at least our developer claims that). Is that true and what are their and downsides (thinking about security issues) with remaining on D5?
_
Upgrading is definitely more complicated than it should be, but I wouldn't say 'extremely'. And the downside to staying with d5 is that it will be end of life as of the release of d7.
I loved your description!
What a vision I got from that! And just knowing that I'm not the only one in the same "boat" - pun intended...
I am working on an upgrade with about 30 or so modules and found that I kept getting errors on the update.php and had to enable the modules. Run update.php, get errors, enable a few more modules. Over and over and over. I made sure I had upgraded to the latest D5 versions before I shut everything down and replaced files.
My biggest challenge so far is working with modules that are either no longer supported/used in D6, or that have splintered - multi features from one module are not split into modules of their own. Still working with this one.
Custom modules are a headache, especially if they depend on a contributed module. Be best thing i found was Boombatower's online Deadwood tool for converting D5 modules to D6. You upload a module and it will attempt to make the necessary changes for you.
So far my CCK fields have survived. Views is another story. None of articles or screencasts I found provided sufficient warning about Views. I'm just so glad I did an export of all the views before I started.
One thing I'm also doing its taking a snapshot of the site with the Demo module now and again and also backing up the db so I have a recent working, partially upgraded version. Hopefully I won't have to start at the beginning again if something goes terribly wrong. (Which has already happened a couple of times.) The site I'm working on is not terribly huge, but lots of views and lots of modules make it tedious.
I've just about got the functionality working with Garland. Next step is to see what happens with the modified Zen theme. I made sure I had a good nights rest and have a lot of comfort snack foods for the process. I'm sure this will go on late into the evening, so I have my Stellas chilling too...
Your post was some time ago. I'm interested in finding out how each of the upgrades went for @joegml , @paulwamail, @wmodes
Note: Right after I posted this I came across this article at Aquia: http://acquia.com/documentation/getting-started/d5-migration/upgrade/tes.... Its for Acquia Drupal, but helpful on my non-Acquia site as well.
I finaly solved my problems
I finaly solved my problems with modules migration, but now i have menus and taxonomy blocks that disapear.
Great part of my problems was solved when I migrate to 5.21 until migrate to 6.15, but it doesn't solve all problems. If someone know how to do this whitout lose the menus and taxonomy blocks please tell me.
Subscribing, still afraid to
Subscribing, still afraid to upgrade a big drupal website to D6..greetings, Martijn
For upgrading a MUST see:
For upgrading a MUST see: http://drupal.org/node/340073 and a very important part for CCK at http://drupal.org/node/822352
For a migration of data to a fresh install from D5 to D6 see http://krimson.be/articles/migrating-content-drupal-5-drupal-6 for an option...
But, I did a standard D5 to D6 upgrade on a medium sized site and got it working successfully! There were 3 custom modules, I also used Deadwood to convert them and following their suggestions, got them all working. This way as well, most if not all permissions, user IDs, node ID's and alias's / links / urls etc stayed the same...
Remember, when you move to the new views in D6, your views will initially not be working / enabled in your list. You'll need to convert them, See #15 of first link node/340073 = "To recover your views, upgrade them at this URL: example.com/admin/build/views/tools/convert (replace example.com with your domain name)."
Hope this helps. Don't rush the process. Plan well in advance. MAKE Backups along the way (so you can back), and if you can, make a list of all the permissions, enabled modules etc in case you foget later on, or loose information.
Best bet is to copy the whole site in to a "staging" folder, duplicate and rename the D5 db for the staging site, point the staging site's settings.php db entry to this new staging site's DB, then do the upgrade....
When you're happy, you can swap the staged, working upgrade to the live folder etc.
DRUSH helps a lot, and speeds things up as you disable contrib modules, and then upgrade, and re-enable...
But be careful, sometimes DRUSH is so clever it does stuff you don't realise later on... ;-)
Stew West