Moving from Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6.x... Harder Than Expected

Well, after hemming and hawing about the pros and cons of the 5.x and 6.x versions of Drupal, I've finally been pushed into upgrading to 6.x.

I've been through the search and forum pages on how to do this and I've come to the simple conclusion that there isn't an easy way to do this.

The videos that talk about upgrading being straightforward tend to use examples with few to no modules involved... and most posts querying about 5.x sites with more modules tend to show that problems abounded.

As you'll see, this has lead to some drastic changes on the WP site.

Throwing Data Away

The first thing I had to realize was that I was going to have to throw a certain amount of data away. No, this isn't fun, but hey, you've got to go with it.

This actually has positives associated with it. My 5.x site was employing between 20-30 modules at any given time... this was overly complex and a support nightmare. It was also the reason why I had to upgrade... the garbage collection and cleanup tasks just weren't running anymore!

So, time to trim down and start with a brand new site, then import.