Site upgrade

Today I did a Drupal update on this site (from 5.6 to 6.1). All went rather well, but getting most of the things to work as before took almost half a day.

Currently many installed modules are in the process of being ported to 6.x, so some things may not work as smoothly as they should, however this should change as they get updated. Read more for my impressions from the upgrade.

Some of the modules I use were not ported yet; some were not substantial, so I've decided to drop them, for some there was only a patch somewhere in the Drupal's tracker, and for a few I had to do some porting myself.

Two things that caused me a lot of trouble were: Zen and Image.

I use a custom Zen's subtheme and updating that required going through most of the modified files and moving my changes to new versions of those files. Not doing anything results in a php error on every page. (You have to at least update path functions in template.php.)

The Image module's upgrade failed with some database queries. It's not hard to fix that by doing what has failed by hand, but it was not until I've completely reinstalled the module that I understood the problem. Not a bad idea to try the upgrade on a test site before proceeding with that big portal ;)

All in all, I've expected worse, and certainly some new features make it worth the time.

The story continued. A day after the upgrade the database grew to an unreasonable size. This is due to some caching not being 'optimal' ;) There is a patch ready, so if your space is limited, be sure to apply it, the patch can be found here: http://drupal.org/node/231587.