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By escrow on
I've been asked to upgrade a Drupal 4.7 installation to Drupal 5 at the very least. I've set up new versions of Drupal before and done upgrades, but nothing on this scale. The existing database is very large with lots of modules and other customizations that break upon upgrading to Drupal 5. I'm wondering what my best course of action is here-I'm doing this in my spare time and not for work, so availability to work on this is an issue as well. Is it worth it to upgrade at all? Or should I just soldier on?
Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.
Comments
Lots of changes from 4.7 to 5
Lots of changes from 4.7 to 5 and not all modules made it. The customizations will of course make it more challenging. On the other hand it is kind of now or never, Drupal 5 is already coasting and when Drupal 7 comes out it will be pretty much dead in the water. So the question to ask is why upgrade, I can say that if you don't upgrade the site features will be essentially frozen with out more custom work. So what do you see as the future of the site, can it exist in its current state or not?
It can exist, but as you
It can exist, but as you said, I worry about it getting frozen out and being stuck in the mud if a major security flaw or something pops up. My other solution was to just build a new Drupal installation and leave the old site up, but I worry about losing search result traffic since any links on that site would go to website.com/oldsite/blog-post rather than website.com/blog-post. Unless you're aware of a way around that problem?
Thanks for the help btw.
I would rebuild the site
Hi,
I would rebuild the site again from scratch on the new technology.
There are ways to export the data from your old site and import it into the new site.
You can most probably retain your old paths using the path module. As long as your paths are not called /node/123 or whatever, you should be able to have the blog posts and articles on your new site with the same URL as those on the old site.
http://africanwebscience.co.za
I've tried exporting the
I've tried exporting the mysql data manually, but there is a lot of taxonomy and supplemental data associated with some of the modules (many of which don't work in Drupal 5 or 6), so this is an equally daunting task.
The next thing I'm going to try is building a new site in Drupal 6, leaving the old site up in a folder within the new site (i.e., www.website.com/old) and using the path redirect module to forward any relevant paths to the old site. Will update here when/if it's done.
Wish me luck :)
Good luck!!
Good luck!!
http://africanwebscience.co.za
You may want to take a look at this
How to Perform a Direct Upgrade from Drupal 4.6.x to Drupal 6.x
http://drupal.org/node/388994