Westki.info Upgraded to Drupal 6

We are pleased to announce that we upgraded our site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. Taking into account that Westki.info is an online newspaper with lots of content, I thought that this news might be of interest to the media sites contemplating upon the upgrade.

The upgrade process was not exactly smooth. We had used lots of modules on our D5 site. Some of them were not ported to D6 (for instance, we had to abandon Node Expire for Scheduler which was ported). We set up a special subdomain to test the upgrade and did so meanwhile developers worked on porting modules to D6. We had to make some minor database tweaks to resurrect the imagefield images after the upgrade. We also reworked our Panels from scratch. We did not avoid the search module vs cron trouble. After upgrade, cron failed to run when search module was installed. We had to abandon it in favor of Google custom search. As for the Views, converting from D5 was pretty easy. Lots of Kudos to merlinofchaos for his great work!

Instead of upgrading our former theme we designed a new one. We still have some glitches, and the work is still in progress. But if you wonder, yes, it is quite possible to upgrade a big site to Drupal 6. It takes some pains, but guess what, it’s worth it. Lots of new features, lots of improvements. Drupal rocks ;-)