By roshan.goonewardene on

I have a, as far as I can tell, Drupal 5.5 installation, which I need to upgrade to 8.8.5 (originally put 8.3 by mistake), and eventually beyond.

The issue is that the system was setup by someone who has left the company many years age, and left no documentation.

My area of expertise, is infrastructure, as such only have a very tenuous grasp of web development. This said however I have managed to build a functional Drupal 8.3 system, with the intention of using te built in migration function, as I initially believed the original system was Drupal 6, based on the date it was created. This I concede was a mistake.

I would be most appreciative, if someone is able to point me in the direction of a standalone tool, to at-least upgrade the existing installation to version 6, from which I can then use the migration tool on the new system to migrate. Failing this, is there a method of manually upgrading the existing system?

Due to the fact that the current Drupal server is a domain joined machine, running IIS, when I took a copy of the server, and placed it in a test environment, the web service is not starting correctly, so this is also an issue. The other issues is that I do not have the Drupal administrator credentials.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

gisle’s picture

gisle
he/him
Primary language Norwegian Bokmål
Location Norway
commented

This is not an area where I claim to have any experience.

I am writing this answer because I suspect that there are not many others that have such experience.

I see that your plan is to upgrade to Drupal 6, and then use the built-in migration tool to upgrade to Drupal 8. I shall not be able to provide any advice about how to do this. I hope somebody else shall.

In my opinion, the built-in migration tool is doing a half-baked job at best. Unless the legacy website is extremely trivial, it will not produce a working website, and bridging the gap from what it produces and a working website is not trivial. I do a vast amount of Drupal work, and I am frequently frustrated by what is produced by the migration tool.

Here is my two cents worth:

  1. Yes, you probably should upgrade to Drupal 8. Version 8.8.5 is OK. (There is also Drupal 9 to consider, but it is currently too bleeding edge for my palate.)
  2. Do not treat this as an upgrade, treat it as a migration. By this I mean that you should care about content and functionality, not the legacy code or modules. When migrating a website, I start out by doing a content inventory of the existing web site, and then construct a new website based upon what is available in the Drupal 8 core and its extensions
  3. After you've set up a functional Drupal 8 website, first migrate the users. See this page about how to do this.
  4. Finally, move the old content into the new content types you've created. If there is little content, I do it by hand. If thre is lot of content, I use software. Some people recommend Feeds for this. I prefer to write my custom export/import module, as I find working directly with SQL is less of a hassle than configuring Feeds. YMMV.

I don't do windows, so I can't help you with IIS. I hope somebody else can. You may want to ask a separate question about this with the word "IIS" in the title to get the right people interested.

As for Drupal administrator credentials, it is easy to fix if you have access to the database, just execute this SQL statement:

UPDATE users SET pass = MD5('myadminpassword') WHERE uid=1;

- gisle

roshan.goonewardene’s picture

roshan.goonewardene commented

Thanks gisle. Sorry, clearly not paying attention to what I was typing. I have version 8.8.5

vm’s picture

vm commented

I concur with what gisle has stated. Trying to get from 5.5 to 7 is likely going to be a nightmare let alone from 7 - 8/9. Far better off with a rebuild and migration of users/content/commets etc.

roshan.goonewardene’s picture

roshan.goonewardene commented

Thanks :)

Do you happen to know whether there is a mapping between the tables in version 5.5, and 8.8? Because when I look, the table names are very different.

vm’s picture

vm commented

there isn't one that I'm aware of. Considering D5 can't be upgraded to D8, I highly doubt anyone would have taken that kind of time.

roshan.goonewardene’s picture

roshan.goonewardene commented

Thanks :)

gisle’s picture

gisle
he/him
Primary language Norwegian Bokmål
Location Norway
commented

Drupal 5.5 and Drupal 8.8 are two very different beasts.

Drupal 5.5 consisted of a maze of twisty little procedures, all different. And the database schema was equally fragmented. Drupal 8 and 9 has replaced that maze with much more broadly scoped classes and unifying all types of content and users into entities. Mapping a database schema based upon the Drupal 5 architecture onto the Drupal 8/9 architecture simply would not make sense, as everything has been taken apart and then refactored to become very different objects (literally).

As I've already said, I don't think you shall get this done by looking at the code – and that includes the code that makes up the database schema. Again: You need to focus on contents and functionality for getting this job done.

- gisle