Posted by glass.dimly on September 21, 2009 at 6:31pm
Hey all,
Is there a module that synchronizes two Drupal sites, migrating nodes created one in the other? My sites are D5 -> D6. I'd like to preserve URL aliases if possible. Mainly I'm synchronizing blogs, with all the related comment/user/node issues. I've seen some ideas out there (Node Export with Node Import), but I'd like to know if anyone has done this simply or has some clever idea.
I'm merging 3 sites into one, and I've done the main content migration (see this insanity). The old sites are live and active, and I want to keep the new site current so launch can happen without re-doing migration.
Comments
Simpler case here.....
I found your "this insanity" posting earlier today and I was scratching my head trying to figure out why it was so complicated until I realized that you were merging sites (with potential for conflicting NIDs). So now the need to use mod rewrite, et cetera makes sense. I don't envy you.
A few weeks back I started the process of migrating a Drupal 5.x intranet site to version 6 on brand-new hardware. I figured it was a chance to "start over" and clean some things up (including OS update from Redhat 4.4 to 5.4). Rather than go through upgrade of Drupal from 5.x to 6.x, I figured I would start with a clean Drupal 6 installation and then just migrate some key data -- users, authmap, nodes and taxonomy. The existing site is actually pretty simple so I figured this would be easy. I have migrated users simply via SQL export/important and that seems OK.
I haven't gotten to taxonomy yet, but migrating nodes looks a lot more complicated than I would have expected. I have done a bulk export of basic pages with the Node Export module (http://drupal.org/project/node_export) but see that there is no option to preserve nodes' nid/vid. We have a fair number of pages that refer to others by nid and I want to migrate them without breaking those links (we'll be enabling clean URLs on the new server!).
This site is pretty simple. No real use of roles (yet), no CCK (yet). I could go back and copy the existing version 5 site and then go through upgrade of everything to version 6, but I thought that doing a non-upgrade Drupal 6 install might reduce cruft. Maybe that is backwards . I guess the questions is whether i can migrate the bare minimum of node/taxonomy without having the new site throw errors every 3rd page load :)
So, a much simpler goal, but if you or anyone have a "How-To" for this simpler case, that would be exciting!
Jim
Upgrade!
Jim,
If I were you, I would just upgrade that sucker via normal Drupal upgrade path. That's the supported way, and you've got loads of smart people that have automated that through the update.php scripts.
If you want to clear cruft, remove and uninstall unnecessary modules first. Uninstallation is supposed to delete the database tables associated with the modules.
Make sure you upgrade all your modules to the latest Drupal 5 versions, then run update.php, disable all your modules, then upgrade to D6, then run update.php, then re-enable your modules with replaced D6 versions, and then run update.php again. Then run update.php again for kicks.
Drupal 5->6 was not very painful for me on the module layer, just the theme layer was a pain. 4.6->4.7 was a huge pain, 4.7->5 was a pain, but 5->6 was quite civilized.
In my experience, the upgrade process is much simpler and less error prone than trying to roll your own upgrade. Rolling your own upgrade is sort of a last resort.
OK, Upgraded
Thanks for your counsel. The nide thing about /var/www/html is how easy it is to move it and start over. I dumped database from our production site and then copied the Drupal install directory. After the update to 5.20 I had some errors from an LDAP module that didn't want to be disabled, but I managed to get it up to version 6.14 later in the day. When I first installed Drupal in late 2006 I didn't have a clue and made sort of a hash of things under /sites, but I have it running now (sans any non-core modules) and it looks like I have a pretty cruft-free starting point.
Now my issue is that I'll need to swap this new server in before many new nodes are added or updated on the old site.
Thanks,
Jim