SEO Expert Blog

This site is now running on Drupal 6, yeah! The basic part of the upgrade process was straightforward:

• Backing up the site with a backup script.
• Deactivating all contrib modules and themes.
• Moving the Drupal 5 files to a new directory.
• Unpacking Drupal 6 and contrib modules in the web root directory.
• Running the database update script.
• Activating contrib modules and themes.
• Running the database update script again.

If you plan to upgrade a Drupal site without having done so before, I highly recommend this screencast by Angie Byron. The video walks you through upgrading a site from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5, but most of the information applies to a Drupal 5 to 6 upgrade as well. Also read the Upgrading Handbook.

The most involving part of this particular upgrade was getting the theme and a custom module to work with Drupal 6. Fortunately there is a fantastic theming handbook for Drupal 6, articles about converting 5.x themes to 6.x and converting 5.x modules to 6.x and the very helpful coder module.

The coder module generates a report for the selected modules and themes, telling which parts of your source code need to be changed to work with Drupal 6. Though it missed some occurrences of the url() and l() functions, that changed in Drupal 6, and the deprecated _phptemplate_variables() function, that is replaced by preprocess functions, the coder module was a great help.

Below is a screenshot of the coder module report. For each warning or error the line number of the file, a description of the problem linking to relevant documentation and the problematic piece of code are displayed.

Thanks to the available documentation, tutorials and tools the upgrade to Drupal 6 was quick and painless.