Upgrading Drupal

I have a website with Drupal 5.1 that was installed about a year back. Everything is working ok - but I am hitting some CCK performance problems that are solved in Drupal 5.8 onwards. So, I want to upgrade - I thought I might as well upgrade to the latest Drupal 5.x release now (i.e. 5.10). I am sure there are lots of others like me who may want to skip and jump many releases directly to the currently latest available release.

To understand how the upgrade works, I read the upgrade.txt file and the update.php code. I tried to find some kind of upgrade FAQ but did not find.

As I understand, there are two areas of upgrade - (1) the codebase and (2) the database (structure/schema & data). I presume that tor the complete upgrade to work properly, both (the codebase and the database) will need to reach 5.10 version.

My questions/suggestions:

1) Do I need to upgrade only one version at a time (5.1 to 5.2, 5.2 to 5.3, and so on)? IMHO, this approach seems bit old fashioned and involves too much work. It seems like as much or more work than creating whole new out-of-can Drupal website.

I am trying to upgrade from 5.1 to 5.10. I searched this forum - most posts point to upgrade.txt.

After reading upgrade.txt, I have better idea. But still does not answer many questions.

Are there any FAQ/Primer/For Dummies kind of posts for this forum about Upgrading Drupal?

IMHO, can such FAQ/Primer kind posts be made "sticky" on this forum - so they can be easily be accessible?

I want to upgrade drupal 5 to 6, but 'forum access' module still under developping in drupal6. Which module can i choose to instead of it?

Whats the best way to save my site and everything related to it incase of problems during upgrading? Also, how exactly do I upgrade?

I am a new bebee in Drupal, Recenlt I just upgraded my Drupal site from 6.3 to 6.4, by following steps in upgrade.txt.
It says turn the site off-line first under /?q=admin/settings/site-maintenance, but then later, I need to switch the site back to on-line, however, no matter what I did, I could't get into a point that allows me to click any button to put my site back to normal, the page in IE always says " Offline".....

What can I do ?

thanks

Steven Zhou

www.melissazhou.com

After upgrading from 6.3 to 6.4 and also updating the CCK module, I tried to run update.php but ended up on a blank screen with "Content-Length: 6868" written in the top left corner.

Checking the status screen, everything seems ok, except for the prompt to update my database (which I obviously can't do).

What does "Content-Length: 6868" mean and how can I fix it?