By IsaacB on

I'm looking for advice for finding the most painless method possible for both updating and upgrading a small company website. Here are my circumstances:

  • I have relatively limited experience with handling Drupal, so bear with me.
  • I've been tasked to update the look and functionality of an existing website. The site was built with Drupal 6 and is not very complex. The vast majority of the site's content has been built with basic "page" content types, and the installed modules don't go much further than ckeditor, views, and backup/migrate.
  • I installed Drupal 7 on a localhost server and built a new site mostly from scratch. I have a new theme in place as well as a relatively expanded variety of modules. I grabbed bits and pieces of content from the live website for testing purposes, designing new content types, views, and Rules to help smooth backstage administration. Ultimately, most of the existing content on the live site will need to have their content types changed.

I haven't had the chance to review the notes and suggestions for applying an upgrade for Drupal 6->7, nor have I had the chance to see how the backup/migrate module would function under these circumstances. I should be able to do that soon, but I'd like to pose the question now: what would be the best means to perform an update like this? I have been told that my company is hoping to replace the server hosting the website entirely, so I'd have a new machine to work with. It would seem to me that the safest approach would be to set up the new machine with a replica Drupal 7 installation that is on my localhost instance, then migrate the live Drupal 6 content over and doctor each piece individually. I foresee problems with using Backup/Migrate to accomplish this, so it may be necessary to move each bit of content by hand. Our site isn't so large that this isn't impossible to do. But still, if a more automated approach is possible, I wouldn't mind looking into it.

Thanks for your time.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

I use the approach of building a new site and then using the migrate module to bring over users and content as needed.

IsaacB’s picture

IsaacB commented

So the migrate module won't have compatibility issues when transferring data between two different Drupal versions?

I suppose I will need to revise the nodes and user data I bring over anyway, might as well use a migrate module to at least package them and send them top the new server. Does that seem reasonable?

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

I installed Drupal 7 on a localhost server and built a new site mostly from scratch.

If you had not already spent the effort, I'd advise you to do a simple upgrade (on a backup copy!), as it's an easier process to understand and it works fine if your site is very simple.

But given that you've invested time and energy in a D7 site, Migrate is your best bet. It will not have any problem with different Drupal versions. And yes, it can migrate between content types (and differing field names) as well. You should not have to write any code, although the UI is not very intuitive and the documentation really is targeted at code-oriented developers.

Migrate supports rollbacks and updates, but I would advise that you run multiple tests on scratch databases to learn how it works.