By tomrue on

I am in process of migrating from a home-based FreeBSD server to Bluehost. One of my Drupal installations is version 5.23 (2010-08-11), which I understand is no longer maintained. It is the oldest core installation I have been running; the rest are 7.xx or 8.xx.

Can anyone point me to the simplest and, hopefully, least problematic upgrade procedure? What should be my target core version at this point in time? Should I go to 7.xx? If so, do I need to step through 6.xx first?

The website currently says:

Unsupported database type
The database type is unsupported. Please use either mysql for MySQL 3.x & 4.0.x databases, mysqli for MySQL 4.1.x+ databases, or pgsql for PostgreSQL databases. The database information is in your settings.php file.

Thank you!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

VM’s picture

VM commented

I'd rebuild the D5 site rather than upgrade it. This would be especially true if any contrib modules are in use.

tomrue’s picture

tomrue commented

Thanks for the suggestion. Not sure what you mean by rebuild.

I can't continue using D5 since (1) Bluehost is a shared server and the MySql version they use is too high for it; and (2) D5 is no longer maintained and is therefore a security risk.

If by "rebuild", you mean copy and paste each of the entries into new entries in a fresh current installation of a current version, that is not a preferred option because of the size of the site. It consists of minutes of local municipal board meetings from 2000 to roughly 2008, as well as links to wav files of board meetings from 2008 to 2016.

My preference is to get the site working on a version of Drupal that is maintained, secure, and current.

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

If by "rebuild", you mean copy and paste each of the entries into new entries

Nope. Build the new site without content -- get the structure and the design right. Then use https://www.drupal.org/project/migrate_d2d to pull the content from your old database into the new. It also will move your files, if they are managed, as well as users, taxonomy terms, et cetera.

All of this can (and probably should) be done offline, on your own computer, then migrated to a production server. I would do all of this with Drupal 7, primarily because I don't think the Drupal 8 migration tools are quite "baked" yet, but others might differ.

I've migrated several D5 sites to D7. The migration tools are not particularly user-friendly or well-documented but they are very powerful once you get them figured out, and I was able to perform my migrations without writing any code.