Migrating Website from 6 to 7

Question

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!

Answer 1

Option A: Upgrade

1. Definition: Replace D6 code with D7 code;
2. run upgrade scripts on D7
3. database Good only for really basic sites Most like your old site

Option B: Migrate

1. Definition: Install new D7 site from scratch with new database; import content,
2. Views, users, etc.
3. Clean Codebase
4. Old content can be left out
5. Retweak IA
6. Tweak Data Model
7. Con: Content Cleanup takes time

There migration tools that can be used

1. 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

2. 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.

3. For "node-content" export/import use the "Node Export" module.

Useful links :

• Upgrade process

• Migrating D6 Content Construction Kit (CCK) to D7 Fields

Answer 2

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...