Nov
21
(2006)
Moving to Drupal 5 Beta?
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: drupal.
I’m seriously considering moving my blog to Drupal 5 Beta 1. It seems stable enough, and the performance (especially with Aggressive Caching) blows Drupal 4.7.4 out of the water. That’s becoming a pretty serious factor for me, as the insane onslaught of comment spam just keeps bringing my server to its knees (I’m looking at YOU, Apkakkallli!)
There are only a handful of modules that I use that don’t have Drupal 5 versions. Of those, I could probably limp along without them until D5 versions are available.(computed field, img_assist, recent blocks, TinyMCE…)
Stephen’s already running a public site on D5, and it seems to be going OK. I just did a test upgrade on my desktop box, and it basically went OK. Well, nothing blew up so fatally that I’d lose sleep over it. And Garland sure is a nice theme…
Comments
9 Responses to “Moving to Drupal 5 Beta?”
I will wait until you have tried it first ;O)
Hey Darcy,
I know I am a bit behind the Drupal conversion curve, but I was sure you had annotated your conversion process from WordPress to Drupal last May. Problem is I can’t find the post(s) discussing how you integrated the WordPress database of posts, comments, pages, etc into Drupal 4.7? I am playing with the idea currently, and I tried exporting my WorPress posts to Drupal using this module -to no avail. Any advice for a potential convert?
Thanks …
I might hold off a bit before updating for good. Early poking looks like all’s well, but the spam blockers aren’t updated yet and I wouldn’t want to go live with a D5 site without those.
In related news - I just updated Bad Behavior to use the latest BB build, and it’s apparently doing a MUCH better job of blocking evildoers, and my site feels a couple of orders of magnitude more responsive. knock wood. cross fingers.
Jim, the recipe I followed is no longer online, but involved migrating from WordPress 2 back to 1.x, then over to Drupal 4.6 and up to 4.7
It wasn’t fun, and was a bit scary, but it worked. I would have tried that module you linked to. You say it didn’t work - what happened? PHP error? Something silent?
I believe it is a php error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: _wp2d_custom_process_text() in …/modules/wp2drupal/migrate.php on line 913
The line in the migrate.php file is the following string:
$string = _wp2d_custom_process_text($string);
The module suggests there may be some issues with PHP 4 (as opposed to PHP 5), so i may have to investigate this further. if it works, it sure beats downgarding and upgrading, but that is still a big IF
Ah. How about using a local machine to do the migration? You could install something like MAMP on your desktop box (or powerbook or whatever) to do the migration with PHP5 and MySQL provided in a self-contained installation, then move the database to the server when done? That’s basically what I did for my migration - it all happened on my Powerbook first, then I moved the results back up to the server.
Excellent tip, Darcy. I’ll give it a whirl …
Thanks.
I’m also quite close on updating to D5 and also for me one of the showstoppers is the lack of anti-spam modules (esp. Akismet). But apart from that I can’t await the moment my sites is updated
D5 simply looks like a great release. One of the main reasons for me to aim for D5 is the jQuery support. Currently I simply have way too many problems (and I don’t want to patch core files 
) to make the Drupal4.x-jQuery combination really enjoyable.