By certaindamage on

I'm consolidating several Drupal sites from different web hosts onto 1 new multisite installation on yet another host. The existing sites are all different versions - 5.3, 5.5, 6.14, 6.15. I don't have the option of upgrading the 5.x sites to 6 on their current hosts - I just have ZIPs of the files and mysql backups. In order to get them all working under one multisite, is it necessary to first install Drupal 5 on the new server? I think I need to do the migration in this order-

1. Install Drupal 5.5
2. Create the databases for the two 5.x sites, and restore them from the backups
3. Upload and unzip the 5.x site backups into 'sites'.
4. Upgrade Drupal 5.x sites to Drupal 6.15.
5. Create & restore databases and files for the other 6.x sites.

Or can I start-off with Drupal 6.15, and upgrade the 5.x sites at the same time that I'm installing them on the new server? All sites are running the same major versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL. Thanks,

ron

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x, Drupal 6.x

Comments

dman’s picture

dman commented

Well, first you are not going to get different core versions of Drupal running on one multisite. You will HAVE to get them on the same version.
That said, in theory it's possible to point D6 at a D5 database and kick off the upgrade. That is sorta what it does anyway. But I'd do a dry run on a test site first.

What you should do is upgrade a local version until you've got them all on the same page. Installing D5 remotely just so you can upgrade it is a bit messy. Normally you'd do that on your test copy.

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

pbarnett’s picture

pbarnett commented

Indeed not; D6 upgrades can be a messy business :-)

You'd have to get the individual sites upgraded on a test installation before going for the multisite - see http://drupal.org/upgrade/

You could do them one at a time and use the same test installation...

Pete.

Quint’s picture

Quint commented

I was thinking you should probably install all the different versions in subdirectories on the target host, with the latest and greatest in the root.

Now, upgrade each subdir's version until they are all at the same version, then switch the DB pointer to the root (multi-site) install.

I switched all ten sites of mine to Drupal multi-site (DMS), then back to single installs, because the traffic tracking was all lumped together, and because, for the monthly upgrades, I had to take all ten sites offline, click off all the modules, keep track of the active modules, yadda yadda yadda, for all ten sites at once. Plus, if it broke, ALL SITES WENT DOWN.

If you want to go DMS, I'd recommend you group several sites into one DMS, but have a couple or few DMS'es, so you don't have 'all your eggs in one basket.'