migrating users and content from D6 to D7

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thermalmusic's picture

Hi all,

I am in the process of developing a site in Drupal 7 to replace a site in Drupal 6 on the same server. We decided to create the new site instead of upgrading the old one for various reasons. I realize there are pitfalls migrating users, nodes, and other data from D6 to D7.

My questions are: has anyone had experience doing this, and what kinds of snags have you encountered? Did you use the migrate V2 module, SQL scripts, drush, or combination of the three?

Any comments, suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Steven

Comments

I just upgraded my own site

iStryker's picture

I just upgraded my own site from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. The upgrade went fairly cleanly. I created two new instances. On my local dev I had strykerenterprise.mydev. Below are the steps I can recall.

  1. Created se6.mydev and se7.mydev. se6.mydev was a new D6 installation with all the modules from strykerenterprise.mydev. se7.mydev was a new D7 installation.
  2. Used backup and migrate module to migrate the database from strykerenterprise.mydev to se6.mydev
  3. Disabled all modules in se6.mydev except ctools (problem with strongarm) and core. Then, backup with backup_migrate module again.
  4. Copied se7.mydev files over to se6.mydev
  5. Downloaded all D7 modules and replaced them in se6.mydev.
  6. Ran upgrade.php. Upgrade was successful except for Strongarm. After enabling ctools it worked.
  7. Downloaded cck-7.x (along with fieldgroup and link), field convert, image legacy.
  8. Upgraded my fields with field convert & content migrate module that comes with cck-7.x. Now all my fields were back to normal.
  9. from field_convert project "Currently, Image and User terms are using this framework to migrate their data to fields on Drupal 7."

  10. Spent awhile fixing my theme. See http://drupal.org/node/254940
  11. Alot of minor stuff, which I forget.
  12. Done.

If you still want to go the non-upgrading route. I would still recommend you upgrade your site, then use built-in views export, node export module, user export module, etc. to migrate your content over. This way the content is going from D7 site to D7 site.

Other things I could think of:

  • You might need the latest 6.x modules install before upgrade.
  • My user had no extra fields so it might be a little more complicated for you.
  • Reference: http://drupal.org/node/1144136 - Migrating D6 Content Construction Kit (CCK) to D7 Fields

upgrade vs migrate

thermalmusic's picture

Thanks for the info and describing your steps.

If I understand correctly you started by creating two instances of Drupal: 6 and 7. Then you copied modules from your original site to se6.mydev, then migrated the original database to se6.mydev thus creating a working copy of your original site. Then you upgraded se6.mydev to 7, etc.

I would prefer to create a new 7 site from scratch and migrate users and content from the D6 site because there are too many modules in D6, a lot of contributed modules are in the main module folder, and image files are all over the place. Basically its a mess, though it still works.

I'm curious if anybody has migrated from D6 to D7 without upgrading D6 to D7 first and what kind of problems they ran into.

Steven

Code Migrate Module

krylov's picture

I wrote the Code Migrate Module for planning and managing a D6 to D7 migration.
https://drupal.org/project/1635422