Upgrade from Drupal 6 to 7, how hard is it?

Update - May 2012

One year have past since I wrote this article. Upgrading these days from Drupal 6 to 7 is certainly easier, safer and a lot less nerve wrecking, though I never think it will be a cakewalk.

I still have a few more complex sites running on Drupal 6. Knowing these sites and their complexity and all the custom glue code created, I also know that a direct upgrade will be hard. Complex sites like those are prob. easier upgraded by only migrating the content.
- Do a minimum clean Drupal 7 install.
- Build basic needed content types and config.
- Recreate the theme in D7 or port you existing.

Then migrate your content. Check out http://drupal.org/project/feeds or for even more flexibility and power http://drupal.org/project/migrate. I'll promice do a writeup of a more complex drupal 6 to 7 migration as soon as my remaining sites are running Drupal 7.

Background

This site have been upgraded from Drupal 6 to 7 and I have more site migration is the work at the moment. Upgrading is, still as I'm writing this, a rocky ride with a few sharp corners. For the one that have been with us since Drupal 5 and have some wage memories from back then we started migrating from 5 to 6, all this sound painfully familiar.

First thing first you need to understand. Drupal core it self migrate just perfectly from 6 to 7 so if you are running a super small/simple installation the upgrade it self should be a breeze. Pleas take the time and read the short but concise UPGRADE.txt located in your Drupal root directory and make sure you understand it before attempting to upgrade.

The tricky part of the upgrade is getting all the extra modules you have installed upgraded. The fewer modules your site is using, the simpler your upgrade path will be. So before you begin, make sure your site uses only modules it REALLY need, and make sure you properly uninstall the modules you decide you not really need to make sure the database is as clean as possible.

Drupal 7 almost 3 years of development provided the core developers a lot of time to include awesome stuff, but also modules. Daniel wrote this post a while back http://www.unleashedmind.com/en/blog/sun/more-than-50-drupal-modules-mov... that is worth a read. It is important to understand how this will affect your upgrade path. The general rule of thumb is. Modules that get included into core is still responsible for providing an upgrade path of the config and user-data, not Drupal core is self.

A good example of this is http://drupal.org/project/cck. got moved into the Drupal 7 core, but core it self does not migrate any of the CCK fields to Drupal 7 core field during the 6 to 7 upgrade. This have to be performed by CCK it self, so you still need CCK to install CCK in Drupal 7. At least to perform the migration of the fields.

Larger sites is naturally more complicated to migrate, and require quite some work reading up on the different project pages and issues and coming up this a battle plan. I find that we are in better shape then back when we moved from Drupal 5 to 6, but there still projects dragging their feet's and have not provided a 7.x branch or/and a migration path. Look in the project issue queue for Drupal 7 port related titles and join the conversation, or even better help out the maintainer(s) with your beautiful hand crafted code.

Changes in D7 architecture will force some modules to die or to change into newer projects. Here is a few places a lot of things are changing and it is worth investing some time reading about:

• Reference stuff, http://drupal.org/project/references
• Views attachment, http://drupal.org/project/eva
• GEO-stuff, http://drupal.org/project/addressfield, http://drupal.org/project/geofield
• Media-suff, http://drupal.org/project/media