By BrotherFats on

Just joined Drupal.org. I could use some advice/suggestions. Here's my story...

My wife has a Drupal 6 website that I built for her back in 2011. She has used it consistently over the years since then, but Drupal was never updated. I came down with serious health problems that made that out of the question, and she had neither the time nor skills to do it herself.

Recently we found out that her site is no longer running. I spoke to the tech support group at her host and they told me this is due to the fact that they recently updated php to php 7, and Drupal 6 will not run on php 7.

So... I need to upgrade her site to Drupal 8. My health has improved and I have the time to do this now. But...

I have a few issues:
- My memory for all things Drupal is almost nil. Too much heavy duty water under the bridge.
- Her site cannot be accessed online.

I have downloaded the entire site to my local machine and have installed XAMPP as well, with both php 5 & 7 available to me.

What steps do I need to take to...
1) get her Drupal 6 site running locally
and then
2) upgrade that site to Drupal 8

I very much appreciate any suggestions, pointers, ideas, links to articles/posts/resources. I do have general technical expertise, but my knowledge of the inner workings Drupal at this point is hazy, if not entirely non-existent.

Thank you.
Chris

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

VM’s picture

VM commented

you need to create a database and import the copy you took from the D7 site
you need to edit settings.php to connect to the new database

The above should get you started getting the old site online. I wouldn't worry about D8 until you get a working copy of D6 and you provide more information regarding what version it is. If it's older then the drupalgeddon hack, you've got some issues to sort out.

BrotherFats’s picture

BrotherFats commented

Thanks, that's a start. Appreciate the comments.

sprite’s picture

sprite commented

Keep in mind that you won't be doing a site "upgrade" ...

You are going to have to learn how to export all the contents of the old site into CSV or XML files and then learn how to import the contents and configuration data like (menus, taxonomy, etc.), into a new D8 or D7 site.

There are numerous modules that can help.

Start by reading the copious documentation for import/export and migrate:

https://www.drupal.org/docs/7

https://www.drupal.org/docs/8

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

BrotherFats’s picture

BrotherFats commented

Thank you! I very much appreciate the input. And I understand what you're saying. It's a new install of Drupal 8 and then a data migration. Got it. I'll read up on that.

BrotherFats’s picture

BrotherFats commented

I ran the Drupal 8 migrate function on my Drupal 6 database. It completed successfully. All the nodes appear to be there in the new Drupal 8 site. However...

None of the text is displayed. Only the titles.

I can edit a node and see the text from the Drupal 6 site there, available for editing. But when I save it, it does not display.

I can add a new node with "Testing new site..." or some such in the body text. THAT does get displayed after saving.

The Drupal 6 site I migrated from was v.6.38, the last available version.

The Drupal 8 site I migrated into was v.8.3.6.

Any suggestions/advice?