Upgrading to Drupal 6

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I've been putting it off for a few years, but I finally decided to upgrade devbee.com to Drupal 6. 

I didn't really need to, but it bothered me that I wasn't running supported code and I figured I might learn something. And I did. Mostly obvious things that I should be familiar with already. 

Drush


I've only ever played around with this. I don't like learning new things unless they are going to be truly useful to me. Drush is definitely something I shouldn't have ignored for so long. It comes in particularly handy when doing a site upgrade as you can download and install modules, clear cache, set variables, run DB updates and a lot more all from the command line. This tool is crazy good if you're comfortable in a terminal.

Themeing didn't change much

I was able to convert my dated theme to 6 with very little effort. I created a .info file, changed the names of the region variables in my page.tpl.php file and tweaked a small amount of CSS. Took me about 20 minutes. Pretty painless. I was able to preserve my table-based layout so all you markup nazis will have an example of bad design.

Minimalism

The whole process was made much easier by the fact that I don't like using a lot of modules. I tend to go with a handful of the more popular modules such as Views, CKeditor, CCK, Pathauto, etc... Because I use only popular modules, I'm almost certainly going to have no trouble upgrading them. At least that's my experience.

Key things to remember

  1. Start with a brand new install of D6 with no contrib modules. It's tempting to try to force an upgrade on your existing site, but it's just not going to work. You must create a clean install. 
  2. Import your old database into the clean D6 database. I tried to skip this and just point D6 to my old database, but then  you end up with missing tables and a whole lot of brokenness.
  3. Run DB updates and get your core Drupal site working before worrying about contrib modules.
  4. Lastly, and this is where drush will save you time, download and enable the contrib modules you need one at a time. 

Unfortunately, the upgrade process is no longer something that can be done by the average site owner. There are going to be snags, and you're going to need to know how to interact with your database to get things up and running. I think this is the reason so many users are still on D5 and D6. I'd really like to see an upgrade path that was more accessible to non-developers, but at the same time, I'm also grateful that Drupal is upgradable and there is no need to manually migrate data for major upgrades. 

At this rate, I should be upgrading to D7 sometime around the end of the decade.