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By GrathXVI on
Hello.
I'm trying to port a website from an older version of Drupal 4 over to Drupal 6, since the server's being upgraded to run on Debian Lenny and it appears that the Drupal 4 installation we have doesn't work with PHP4. What would be the least painful way to do this? Alternatively, is there a way to make Drupal 4 play nicely with PHP5 or make Lenny play nicely with PHP4?
So far, attempts at doing the upgrade path from Drupal 4 -> Drupal 6 yielded several errors in the site when I got to the latest version of Drupal 4 and an entirely broken site when I upgraded to Drupal 5. Attempts at making Lenny play nicely with PHP4 ended when the latest version of php4-mysql I could find was incompatible with one of the dependencies for mysql/apache2/php4.
What should I do? I talked to my boss, and he said that the preference was on doing this as painlessly as possible, rather than necessarily doing it the best way.
Comments
If a Drupal 4 -> Drupal 5 ->
If a Drupal 4 -> Drupal 5 -> Drupal 6 upgrade doesn't do the trick, see how much time it would take to recreate it from scratch on Drupal 6, might be faster (port the theme, migrate the content, etc).
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There is no Drupal 4. The naming was different before Drupal 5.
- Dupal 4.5
- Dupal 4.6
- Dupal 4.7
- Dupal 5
- Dupal 6
- Dupal 7
These are all major versions, and the code, themes, and the database schema (both core and contributed modules) are never compatible between major versions. You will have to go through each upgrade, following the instruction religiously and hoping for luck.
But first thing you need to find your version. (This is also necessary for answering your PHP question.)
Drupal Version
It appears to be Drupal 4.7 from my poking around in the update.php file, there are mentions of '4.6 to 4.7 migration' and other such comments.
The header in update also has this information, which is probably close to the last time the site was updated:
// $Id: update.php,v 1.186.2.1 2006/10/18 20:14:41 killes Exp $
So even if I can get it working with PHP5, it should most likely be updated. A lot.
Edit to note:
I did manage to get it to display the website while running PHP5, however logging in to accounts did not work. Go to login page, log in, get to the first page after the login screen and immediately get kicked out of the account as soon as you try to do anything. No messages or errors, just immediate de-authorization as soon as you log in. Obviously, this isn't exactly the desired state of affairs.
=-=
do a search for logins and PHP 5.2 most are in reference to Drupal 5.x when this problem started to unconver itself. I don't know that a fix ever went into Drupal 4.7.x as it wasn't developed on PHP 5.x as far as I know.
Ultimately the issue should correct itself once you are upgraded to Drupal 5.x
.
Try this:
http://drupal.org/node/102114
(an easy fix)
Or even better, update to 4.7.11
http://drupal.org/node/208598
(An easy update, everything is compatible across 4.7 releases)
To find your exact current version look at the top of either CHANGELOG.txt or modules/system.module
But remember that if you postpone the big update for a year or two more it may become impossible, with the evolution of server software.
Good point, I assumed he
Good point, I assumed he meant Drupal 4.7.