Upgrading Drupal

Hi

I'm a newcomer to drupal who's taken over an existing drupal 6.25 installation. I'm pretty confident I can handle it (with study), but I'm looking for a little advice, please. My apologies for asking basic questions; I know these issues have been discussed before in great detail, but I'm looking for help suited to my rather elementary level.

The first thing I want to do is to upgrade to drupal 7. It seems sensible to do this before embarking on other major changes and additions. I've looked at the standard upgrade instructions of course (http://drupal.org/upgrade/). It's clear enough, but the process is rather complex and I'm wondering if there's a way to simplify it. I run several wordpress sites, which I installed with subversion, and updating them is child's play. Could I convert my existing drupal site to subversion? Or, more generally, are there any ways I could reorganize the site to make upgrades easier in future, or any plug-ins or scripts I could use to simplify the process? (A friend mentioned a script called Migraine.) I should mention that I have a created a copy of the existing site as staging site, with the idea that I could try out updates on that and then copy it over to the production site when it's all working. Is that feasible? Are there any problems or pitfalls I should be aware of?

Aufter upgrading D6 to D7, the "Forums" vocabulary is no longer linked to forums. (kind of.)

The old forum posts still have the correct forum, but i can't assign a forum to a new post, because the dropdown is empty.
But when I add a new forum, it is still added to the vocabulary. In the forum content type I have of course selected the correct vocabulary.

Do you have any ideas how i could fix that?

Thank you!

I am trying to upgrade a site from Drupal 7.14 to 7.15.
Although I am logged in as user 1 (admin) trying to run update.php always gives me the access denied page. I have tried changing $update_free_access in settings.php to be TRUE but this makes no difference, I am still getting the Access denied page.
I find I now also get the same result when reverting to Drupal 7.14

Any suggestions please?

I am coming in as a new dev - from a front end dev background - and new to Drupal - on a rather complex intranet setup that includes a both content types and users with first and last names stored in the data_field_first_name and data_field_last_name tables in the database.

An upgrade was done from a couple versions back on Drupal to Drupal 7.14. At the same time, upgrades were done to a great number of modules, some of which may be involved here. Unfortunately, not understanding fully how user creation and content creation work in Drupal, I am not certain which modules might be involved, but I can tell you that the Entity API and Token modules were all upgraded, and I have a feeling that's where the problem might lie.

Essentially, we have a content type, Students, and we have a user type, Providers- both with first and last names that are being stored in the data_field_first_name and data_field_last_name tables in the database. Whenever a new Provider is created, it is created as both a content type and a user in the database. Post update, the Provider User is being created with a duplicate entity ID in the database tables- unfortunately, a duplicate of a previously existing Student, Admin, or Provider content type. As a result, on the front end of the site, provider names are being shown as the student name with the same corresponding entity ID.

I'm trying to upgrade Drupal from 6.26 to 7.14 and I am getting the following error with one of the modules I wrote:
(20024)The given path is misformatted or contained invalid characters: Cannot map GET

It's supposedly an Apache error, but I don't have the problem with D6.

Here is the code:with this code:
<?php
function draw_fusionchart($elementArray){
drupal_add_js(drupal_get_path('module', 'fusion_interface') .'/FusionCharts_Personal/Code/FusionCharts/FusionCharts.js', 'file');
include_once('./'.drupal_get_path('module', 'fusion_interface') ."/FusionCharts_Personal/Code/PHP/Includes/FusionCharts.php");

$chartType = $elementArray[0];
$strXML = $elementArray[1];

$flashsource = base_path() . drupal_get_path('module', 'fusion_interface') ."/FusionCharts_Personal/Code/FusionCharts/" . $chartType;

//Create the chart - MS Column 3D Chart with data contained in strXML
return renderChart($flashsource, "", $strXML, "productSales", 600, 300);
}

The error occurs on the "drupal_add_js" line. The error does NOT occur with the following code:
<?php

function draw_fusionmap($strXML){
include_once('./'.drupal_get_path('module', 'fusion_maps_interface') ."/FusionMaps_Personal/Code/PHP/Includes/FusionMaps.php");

drupal_add_js(drupal_get_path('module', 'fusion_maps_interface') .'/FusionMaps_Personal/JSClass/FusionMaps.js');

hey all

right now i have drupal 7 running on mac os x server (10.6). i'm considering upgrading the box to 10.7. while i don't think it should be an issue ... you know how that can go. ;) so i was just curious if anybody heard of any issues (anecdotal or otherwise) or had any links/references i could check out first? i did a google, but couldn't really find any solid info.

thanks in advance!

ted