Cleaning out the crud - how to nearly reset a drupal site?

By canadrian on 4 Jun 2009 at 18:17 UTC

I've had a Drupal site for about six years now, upgrading from version to version, installing and uninstalling modules, etc. The Drupal site was imported from a PHP-Nuke site, which was imported from a B2Evolution blog, which was imported from a Blogger blog, all stemming back to 2002. For whatever reason, these days the site just doesn't work so well. It does strange things, cron won't always run properly, modules don't really do what they should, permission tables seem messed up (even after rebuild), and I know there's a lot of old gunk in the database from old modules I don't use anymore.

Basically, I don't know all what's going on, but overall it just "ain't right". Now I'm happy to re-build the site from the ground-up - reactivate and reinstall modules, re-set all the config options, permissions, etc. But I have 50 user entries and about 4000 nodes I don't want to lose.

Is there a way I can keep my users, nodes, and taxonomy, and just reset the rest to zero as if it were a new Drupal 6 install? It's something I think I'd really like to do. You know, like periodically wiping your hard drive and re-installing the OS, because over time it just gets ineffably gummed-up.

Comments

Start with a clean install...

Anonymous (not verified) commented 4 June 2009 at 18:31

Start with a clean install, and all configuration done.
The use the Nde-export modules (http://drupal.org/project/node_export) To export the modules from the old site, and import them in the new site.

Lot of work!!

Thanks for the reply. I'd

canadrian commented 4 June 2009 at 19:26

Thanks for the reply. I'd forgot about exporting and importing a CSV. But you're right, it would be a lot of work.

Is there a simpler, non-3rd-party way to do this? i.e. could I create a new site with default database contents, and then replace the users, node, and taxonomy tables with the ones from my old site? (Possibly sequences table as well?)

No? No one knows? It's

canadrian commented 9 June 2009 at 13:46

No? No one knows? It's alright, I could do the csv export/import, but it would be a lot more labour intensive than just exporting/importing key tables.