ACEIZE Tracking the current state of Science and Technology

I decided to update Aceize.com. Why update? Well, there have been a lot of improvements to drupal over the last three years. They have moved from version 4.7 to version 6.x. It is faster, easier to administer, and the modules have had a little more time to mature.

About a week ago, I tried to update the CAPTCHA for the anonymous comments. There are many new versions of the CAPTCHA module available. Unfortunately, none are available for 4.7. So, I can either let this site be overrun by spam, or I can upgrade to version 6.x.

I looked into upgrading a long time ago, but this site features a very complicated setup. There are almost 40 independently created and contributed drupal modules involved in this aceize website. So, I kept putting off the upgrade. Until now.

Here's a quick walk through of the process thus far.

1. Catalog all the modules involved in the site. I created a spreadsheet to keep track of them.
2. Determine if the module needs to be upgraded. For Aceize, if the module enabled any sort of data, I figure that the module needs to be upgraded. This means all the CCK, Images, Taxonomy, and Views especially.
3. Get all the relevant 6.x and 5.x module releases. For each of the modules that I decided needed to be upgraded I downloaded releases for both versions of drupal. I also downloaded other modules if they were available.
4. Setup a test site. I wanted to run through the upgrade before actually attempting it on the live site.
5. Upgrade to version 5.x.

This is where I am so far. My test site is up to version 5.x. There are some apparent problems thus far. Namely, not all of my content containing modules have been upgraded between version 4.7 and 6.x. The spam module, for instance. The spam module contains a database of spam that this site has received over the last 3 years and filters incoming comments accordingly. I would rather not re-train a new spam filter. Also, the active select option for attaching taxonomy items with cck has disappeared. I will need to generate a work around.