Readying To Upgrade To Drupal 5.0

At Trellon¹, I've finally gotten a chance to install Drupal 5.0 - only to find out that while I was working, they snuck Drupal 4.7.6 and Drupal 5.0 in on me. This site uses some modules from 4.7.x which are yet to be ported. While I may not appear to be doing much, I'm getting ready to port this site to 5.x because of all the features it comes with. That said, I've been working with a Drupal 5.0 site on a development server.

The 5.0 administrative pages and workflow takes some getting used to for those that have used Drupal for a while - but it may be more intuitive for fresh eyes. I know that I've spent a good bit of time looking for things in the navigation menu which, at the least, aren't made active by default. This means a cleaner menu, but it also means power users may twitch a little with the switch. It grows on you, so it isn't so bad.

The real fun is Converting 4.7.x modules to 5.x, which involves - at present - 44 changes in the way things have to be done to work with Drupal 5.0. It doesn't mean it is difficult. The more complicated a module, the more involved it is to upgrade. I expect that it will take about 2 weeks of module development on my own time to get KnowProSE.com to 5.0. Maybe they'll be up to 5.2 by then.

Overall, I'm having a lot of fun with Drupal 5.0 on the development server at work and looking into the module upgrades for KnowProSE.com. There's also some integration with SecondLife that I'm working on which is pretty fun as well - and hopefully useful.

Build once, use many. :-)

¹ KnowProSE.com, of course, houses my own thoughts and so on - and isn't affiliated with Trellon in any other way but different shades of Taran.