The migration process is more or less complete, so much so, that I've decided to flip the site over. So, as of right now, the http://www.wingedpower.com proper is now being hosted from the latest and greatest Drupal 6.x series platform.

For the pros, cons, trials and tribulations, and my thoughts, please... read on...

What This Upgrade Buys The Site

Gains as a result from this upgrade:

• Improved site responsiveness
• Improved management interface
• Removal of legacy/clunky modules
• Dumping old database tables that no longer were used, but were still referenced by unclean module removals
• Switch over to the A3_Atlantis theme, which I really like

Delated gains due to time required to properly migrate site content/etc:

• Eventual switch from Smugmug bridge module for gallery images to Gallery2/G2 module for Gallery2 integration. Yes, I know, I WAS hosting via Gallery2, but went to Smugmug... and am now going back.. what's up? (More on this later...)
• Amazon items... the format is different and the pervasive Amazon items and images throughout the site will be a little less pervasive. New module, new rules. Manual migration...
• News feeds are all on hold... and most will probably not come back again.
• Google advertisements, currently on hold, pending how I want the site to look.

Upgrading From 5.x to 6.x: Pain Points and Hardships

It's not all gains, in the move to 6.x. For one thing, there was no clear and easy path to upgrading/migrating an existing site. That REALLY hurts. Thankfully, my day job involves php and mysql data mangling, so I was able to whip up some scripts that did the following:

• Take old node information and correlate it to its matching latest revision and related asin and insert it using the original creation time into the new Drupal 6.x installation using a custom php script that employed the Drupal bootstrapping process. Ie, looping through the old database and performing node_save()'s.
• Conversion of Amazon tags in my content from the old Drupal 5.x format to the newer Drupal 6.x format, which changes the parameter order and even the output format. Needless to say, this took some time to figure out how to properly reassociate asin(s) to nodes and how to perform text order replacement in thousands of nodes. Fun stuff.
• Working around pathauto subtleties... ie, title conversion differences. Solution? Search404 is now an OR based result. 
• No more Smugmug module, which I loved and enjoyed in 5.x. In 6.x, the only viable option was Gallery2's integration module, which I had been testing on a beta site. So, I'm generally okay with it. I can always just link to my smugmug galleries, but then again... with the economy the way it is... maybe it's time to scrap my membership there and save some $$
• Just dumped dozens of views, thousands of taxonomy terms, and other bits and pieces. Most everything that I imported over from the old site, I just put it under "archive", which is synonymous with Legacy. :)

All in all, the migration took some 3 days to figure out. Simply put, there is no "clever" way to do it. Just alot of good old deep understanding of how your site and content is supposed to behave and figuring out how to employ php coding to automagically convert/migrate bits and pieces of that data over, in phases, to the new site.

My knee jerk reaction would be for the Drupal community to just figure out a migration tool... but then I look at all of the unstable and out of support modules I was using... and you quickly realize, short of a vanilla site, a global/universal migration tool just isn't feasible.

I see this as a purging experience and one which has had me shed a site that was weighed down with hacks and half baked ideas, leaving behind a brand new shiney site that is responsive and finishes automated runs so quick, I wonder if the job ran at all.

Those who are holding out at 5.x would be well served going to 6.x. And yes... all of those headaches you are wondering how you are going to surmount... well, some of them can't be. :) But the new platform is definitely better than the old one.

~ Wing