Upgrade to Drupal 5.x

Yesterday I installed my first Drupal 5.x site from scratch. It was really easy. Coming from a 4.7 site the makeover of the installation procedure was impressive. The database tables were created automatically. There were hints given for possible security issues with file and folder permissions - great. Just after about 15 minutes it was up and running.

Then it was working through the administration options. Again the developers did a great job in making it easy for an administrator. Some changes have been made  from the 4.7 version - but again they are very helpful.

Now having had that experience I decided to upgrade this site from version 4.7 to 5.1. Originally I planned to do that in the summer, but I did not want to maintain two different versions on different servers. So I decided today to take the risk and try to update. Well, to make a short story even shorter, it was as easy as it was documented in the upgrade.txt file in the distribution.

It took me about an hour of make all the backups and to start up the new version. No content was missing! For everything that belongs to the Drupal 5.1 distribution the upgrade was as easy as 1 to 10. The only drawback at the moment is that some contributed modules aren't available yet. I am particularly waiting for the taxonomy_menu and the refine_by_taxonomy modules. With some of the available modules I still have to figure out how to get them to behave like I would like them to do. But there have been only 6 hours since I started the upgrade (I had a good lunch too!).

I was very impressed at what all has been changed for the 5.1 release and also at the very quick adaption of the contributed modules to the 5.x version of the core.

Great work! Thanks a lot!
Ulrich