SEO Expert Blog

After months of silence not being sure whether to continue with SEO Expert Blog I decided to update this web site to Drupal Version 5. It was not an automated update but a fresh install copying part of the content by hand.

Why when Drupal offers less painstaking ways of upgrading to a new version?

Too much play

It is truly bad practice but I did it. SEO Expert Blog was my first live site running on Drupal and I used it too extensively test features of Drupal and a number of the contributed modules.

Drupal stores information for every enabled module in the database, including information on the location of the module in the file system, the module settings, the tables created by the module, and locale information if the locale module is enabled.

I ended up with a lot of useless entries for modules it did not use anymore bloating the database. Also quite a lot of spam comments were posted and spam accounts created. For better performance I would have needed to delete many entries by hand after updating all tables in of the existing database.

Backing up and restoring part of the tables and copying some of the content manually together with a fresh Drupal install seemed more attractive than following the Drupal update process presented in this great videocast by Lullabot. This is definitely the way to go if you have a Drupal 4.7.x install that is not messed up and you have lots of content, comments, users, etc.

SEO Crime

The number of links back to this site is manageable. Most of them point to the domain and not to particular page. I left some URLs untouched but a considerable number of them changed.

Generally this is a bad thing to do. Still I opted for shorter links with dashes instead of underscores, excluding common grammatical words.

With lots of back links to content pages this would not have been an option.

Drupal5 rocks!

Drupal5 is really cool and adds many interesting new features and modules. So one of the first things I did with my fresh install was installing new modules and a new theme.

This time I did not enable the locale module though and there is a new cool feature that comes with the function hook_uninstall(). It can be used in modules to remove tables and database records like settings stored in the variable table. So its easier to keep the database tidy.

Drupal5 will be fun to play with :-D