Ever wanted to change the Drupal 7 markup? Get rid of all those pesky divs? If so, this is article for you. I will give you a simple example how to do this not by changing the site theme (template.php) but by using a theme function.
Note: This is a blog post I wrote about 9 months ago but never actually never finished. The server this was for died upon me so I was not able to verify that this was bulletproof and kinda forgot about the hole post before today. I'll decided though to publish it as is.
Some of us (lik me) are stuck with old Centos 4.x installations. My web servers are located hundreds of miles away and gaining physical access make a Centos 4.x to 5.x/6.x upgrade more and less impossible. The second best way of fixing this is to compile your LAMP stack from source, should say AMP then the scope of this is not to compile the Linux kernel. Was original hoping for that someone had prepacked RPM/SRPM packages but could not find any repo. what where not out of date.
So I'm not dead. Just been to lazy or stressed out to write anything on my own blog. I'm still here and I'm still working full time with Drupal. I joined the University of Bergen, which is the second biggest university in Norway, in the end of February 2012 for a two/three year Drupal project. My ability to take on new projects have been temporary reduced.
## Updates
- May 2012 - One year have past since I initially wrote this article. Upgrading these days from Drupal 6 to 7 have become easier, safer, and a lot less nerve wrecking, though it will never become a cakewalk.
- May 2015 - Started writing a longer series using Migrate and Migrate D2D.
- May 2015 - Cleaned up language a corrected grammar erros.
## To migrate or upgrade?
As writing do I still have a few more complex sites running on Drupal 6. Knowing these sites, their complexity, and all existing glue code, a fast and easy upgrade will be hard pull off. It might be easier for complex sites to only migrate the content using modules like migrate and migrate_d2d.
### A data migration
- Do a clean Drupal 7 installation.
- Build basic needed content types and configurations.
- Recreate the theme in D7 or port you existing CSS/SASS styles.
Then migrate your content by using modules like http://drupal.org/project/feeds, or for even more flexibility and power http://drupal.org/project/migrate. I'll promise do a blog post of a more complex Drupal 6 to 7 migration as soon as my remaining sites are running Drupal 7.
