I am a student, I have a project for a client, www.wac-stl.org
they are running Drupal 6. I need to upgrade it to Drupal 7 to I can install CiviCRM.
What is the best way to do this? If you can take a look at the website, I think it is a very basic website, so do you imagine I would have any trouble upgrading?
Also, I only have FTP access to the website files, I do not have database access. Will this be a problem for me?
Thank you!
Option A: Upgrade
- Definition: Replace D6 code with D7 code;
- run upgrade scripts on D7
- database Good only for really basic sites Most like your old site
Option B: Migrate
- Definition: Install new D7 site from scratch with new database;
import content,
- Views, users, etc.
- Clean Codebase
- Old content can be left out
- Retweak IA
- Tweak Data Model
- Con: Content Cleanup takes time
There migration tools that can be used
Features - Allows you to export content-types, users and structures
(e.g. Taxonomy, Image-styles, etc.) into a module-like package An
excellent guide is available here:http://drupal.org/node/580026
Feeds - Feeds is a contributed module that allows one to import and
export content from a csv, xml, or rss format. Visit the feeds
project page for more information.
For "node-content" export/import use the "Node Export" module.
Useful links :
Upgrading a drupal site from a major version to the next one is a challenging task, no matter how "basic" is the site involved. You should definitely do that on a copy of your website in a development environment and deploy the upgraded version only after you have it fully tested.
To do that you most certainly need to have a copy of the site's database: if you can't access the db server directly you can try one of a number of modules that can help you to do that (e.g. http://drupal.org/project/dumper).
You need to read the upgrade guide thoroughly (http://drupal.org/documentation/upgrade/6/7 and follow all the links).
And, as CivicCRM actually has a Drupal 6 version, you might want to consider to stick with D6...