Upgrading Drupal

I've recently upgraded from 5.4 to 5.5, then 5.6, and had no problems whatsoever until yesterday when I confidently upgraded my sites to 5.7. Now the "Body" text box is missing from create/edit forms for pages and stories. It's still there for forum and blog postings.

I deleted my database while doing some housecleaning on my server. No problem. The site was getting old. I upoladed V6 to my site, but when I go to the site, I'm presented with the following:

Warning: Unknown column 'serialized' in 'field list' query: SELECT data, created, headers, expire, serialized FROM cache WHERE cid = 'variables' in /homepages/29/d182458118/htdocs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 128

Warning: Unknown column 'serialized' in 'field list' query: UPDATE cache SET data = 'a:123:{s:13:\"theme_default\";s:4:\"meta\";s:13:\"filter_html_1\";i:1;s:18:\"node_options_forum\";a:1:{i:0;s:6:\"status\";}s:17:\"menu_primary_menu\";i:2;s:19:\"menu_secondary_menu\";i:2;s:19:\"file_directory_temp\";s:4:\"/tmp\";s:9:\"site_name\";s:19:\"Icenrye Productions\";s:9:\"site_mail\";s:22:\"geoicenrye@icenrye.com\";s:11:\"site_footer\";s:0:\"\";s:9:\"anonymous\";s:9:\"Anonymous\";s:14:\"site_frontpage\";s:4:\"node\";s:9:\"clean_url\";i:0;s:8:\"site_403\";s:0:\"\";s:8:\"site_404\";s:0:\"\";s:11:\"error_level\";s:1:\"1\";s:14:\"watchdog_clear\";s:6:\"604800\";s:5:\"cache\";s:1:\"0\";s:14:\"cache_lifetime in /homepages/29/d182458118/htdocs/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 128

Well, I guess that headline will get some attention.

But seriously, DO NOT attempt to update to 6.0 unless you are working on a cloned test server because you will almost certainly have issues. In fact I wouldn't even attempt an upgrade until V6 has been around for a while and gone through at least one upgrade itself, to iron out the major upgrade headaches. The system is just too complex to expect it to go smoothly at the outset.

I've always been able to upgrade easily and seamlessly within 5.X but this time even though I followed the new instructions perfectly it failed with unrecoverable errors, and I was not able to restore the old version and DB for unknown reasons (I had never attempted a DB restore before) - I got a really weird error.

See my previous post which so far has no replies - not surprising - it's a cryptic error problem which few can really decipher, and that's the whole problem here.

We are using Drupal because it supposedly obviates the need to know a lot about code and system administration crap. But the update process needs to be much more automated. It's really an extraordinary pain in the neck and fraught with difficulties - not for the faint of heart. Great strides have been made to simplify site admin and theming, for example, but this is the next big hurdle.

Just for example:

Tried to upgrade 5.7 to 6.0 but got this error:

An error occurred. http://68.107.24.241:8080/update.php?id=1&op=do <br /> Fatal error: Call to undefined function taxonomy_get_vocabularies() in /usr/local/www/apache22/drupal/modules/forum/forum.install on line 113

Then tried to go back to the old version by using phpmyadmin and importing the old .sql file dump but got this error:\

I received this error after running update.php:

Duplicate entry '1-filter-3' for key 2 query: ALTER TABLE filters ADD UNIQUE KEY fmd (format, module, delta) in /home/mynamehere/public_html/site2/includes/database.mysql-common.inc on line 403.

What do I have to do? I'm not too familiar with updating mySql tables manually...but if someone could guide me?

PS: After running update.php a second time, I received no errors, but I'm worried I've broke something.

update.php did not go smoothly, I think one or more of my tables got broken...

Most pages were giving me a `can't find function user_access' error, I fixed that manually by using drupal_load(...) in modules.inc

Now, I get stuck in
Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in /home/web/includes/form.inc on line 342

no idea where this is coming from, and which database is hosed.

the big issue I have is that I cannot go back to a `clean' database simply, since I don't have an easy access to
backup and migrate, as I can't even login for now...

;(