Drupal Upgrades

Green Crescent offers complete services in Drupal upgrades and website and data migration.

Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 Upgrades

Now that Drupal 7 is stable and the vast majority of contributed modules have been released for Drupal 7 (as well as many newer and much better offerings), it’s time to think about upgrading your Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7.

Due to Drupal’s policy regarding backward compatibility when Drupal 8 is released, Drupal 6 will no longer be supported. (If you’re running Drupal 5, you should upgrade right away to Drupal 6 then to Drupal 7).

The upgrade process for Drupal can be extremely complex and full of pitfalls for complex websites, or relatively quick and easy for simple sites.

A good set if basic instructions are offered here: http://drupal.org/documentation/upgrade/6/7

For those that need to upgrade CCK fields to the Drupal 7 core fields module you can read this: http://drupal.org/node/1144136.

While many websites can get pretty far following these instructions as far as migrating the Drupal core, CCK, and many contributed modules, there are numerous things that can’t be automated and that will require the work of an experienced Drupal developer.

Some of the major tasks include:

• Drupal 6 to 7 theme upgrades – Drupal has made some pretty significant changes to which will require a skilled themer/developer.
• Drupal 6 to 7 contributed module migrations – while many contributed modules update easily in other cases, modules have been depreciated in favor of new and improved versions that better leverage the poweer of Drupal 7. In such cases, you will require the services of a skilled developer to migrate the data as the database structure in Drupal 7 is significantly different than that Drupal 6.
• Drupal 6 to 7 custom module migrations – if you have custom modules, they will need to be modified for Drupal 7.

Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 Upgrades

If you’re currently running Drupal 5, the time to upgrade is now. You should not attempt to upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7 directly, rather you should first upgrade to Drupal 6, then to Drupal 7 (though in some cases, where there’s not a direct migration path, you may be able to migrate data from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7 with an old-fashioned database migration performed by a skilled developer).

Green Crescent offers full services in Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 upgrades.