Starbow Consulting

In a classic case of the cobblers’ kids having no shoes, until yesterday starbowconsulting.com was still running on Drupal 5. With the Drupal 7 code freeze just days away, I figured it was time. Some of my hesitation stemmed from bitter memories. My website has been around since the Drupal 4.6 days, and the upgrades to 4.7 and 5 were unpleasant. Turns out I should have done it months ago. Upgrading 5 to 6 has easily been the most straightforward upgrade yet. It has taken me a fair bit of time, but that is mostly playing with all the new capabilities and having fun retweaking my workflow.

Here is a stream-of-consciousness report of the process.

• Install Drupal 6.13 in new location, setup drupal6.starbowconsulting.com to point at it.
• Make a copy of the old database.
• Create sites/drupal6.starbowconsulting.com
  • Copy sites/default/default.settings.php to ites/drupal6.starbowconsulting.com/settings.php
  • Edit settings.php $db_url to point at new copy of old db.
• Set $update_free_access = TRUE
• Run update.php – note, I haven’t moved over any modules, so this just updates the core. Quick and dirty approach that could come back to bite me.
• Download the latest stable drupal 6 version of all my modules (started as short list, since this site is mostly a simple blog, but quickly grew).
• Enable Backup & Migrate first, and use it to take a db snapshot.
• Turn on all the contrib modules I want to use.
• Run update.php again.
• This went fine, if it had failed, I would have reverted to the snapshot, and updated one module at a time.
• Recreated my views
• Annoying but straightforward. I love views2
• Upgraded from Simple Menu module to new industry standard: Admin Menu.
• Used my Format Manager module to debug by messed up formats.
  • Textile filter doesn’t play nicely with some other filters.
• Textile filter only seems to be handling two-levels of indented bullets.
• Used Better Formats to setup a different default format for me and anonymous users.
• Used Twitter module to create a nicer looking view block, rather than just Aggregator to pull down my feed.
• Also setup to tweet when I add a new blog post.
• Switched to view blocks for Recent Comments
• Using Wabi theme instead of Styled Beauty (which has no Drupal 6 version)
  • Not quite as arty, but very readable.
  • A little table crazy.
  • Not sure if I am sold, but it is fine for now.
  • Annoyingly, you need to resubmit the theme configuration page after changing the style.css file, so the color-style.css override file is regenerated.
• Tweaked page.tpl.php to work with PopupAPI.
• Tweaking theme to remove homepage (aka spam bait) from Anonymous comment form
• http://drupal.org/node/147502#comment-1654954
• Tweaking theme to highlight authors comments.
• http://wesleybailey.com/articles/how-to-highlight-author-comments-drupal
• Replaced obsolete Google Sitemap with XMLSitemap
• Moving from Mollom to CAPTCHA + Spam – we’ll see how it goes
  • Note: You really need to install a TTF font for CAPTCHA to be usable.
• It would be nice if Spam integrated with views.
• Installing Comment Notify to let anonymous commenters see when someone else replies to thread
• I hope this will make discussions more dynamic.
• But, opens up bigger window for comment spam.
• Hmm, missing the ability to set URL redirects directly on a node edit form?

• Replace Admin block module with a comment view for keeping on top of moderated comments (now auto-moderated by spam module).