I've finally put to bed the last of my drupal 4.7 sites. Everything is running on 5.1 now. The migration was pretty smooth despite the vast number of small fiddly bits that needed changing; everything worked pretty much according to plan, which is surprising for combined software/database/server migrations; I seem to know what I am doing!!! There were two small glitches that had me puzzled for a bit. In the first case the database migration had dropped some nice help text I had written for submittion forms, I reinserted them by hand from a mysqldump --opt text dump of the original database. Annoying but straightforward once I discovered the correct place to put the text back to. The second case was the mysterious failure to load the main stylesheet for the art.draisey.ca site ... until I got a look at the log files. I had left a rewrite rule in my apache config as part of the temporary glue to keep the separate components of my migration temporarily in sync; I had written the rewrite rule a little bit too broadly and was sending my css requests to never-never-land. Duh. The largest part of my time was simply trudging through the mundane but necessary steps to get it all together.

Drupal 5 should be much nicer to administer, versioned modules in particular. Now all my site specific data lives under the sites subdirectory so the main package upgrade and module upgrades should all take less effort and give meaningful feedback should I miss a step, (except for the image module is still a throw-back to the bad old ways!)