I have written a 24-page guide to upgrading a fully-loaded production Drupal based website to Drupal 6.x (complete with downloadable “before” and “after” drupal sites), and it has been published as a Wrox Blox, and is now on sale for $6.99. I sincerely hope people find it useful.
This Wrox Blox shows you how to perform a complete upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 for a simple but non-trivial Drupal site involving the Drupal core itself, and several indispensable modules. There are step-by-step instructions for carrying out this upgrade, outlining the best practices to be followed. These include the recommendation of using a test site in conjunction with a subversion repository for version control and deployment to production. Also provided are resources for gaining insight into any pitfalls, and other detailed information that might be necessary to prepare for and to complete the upgrade. The idea has been to present a thoroughly realistic approach here, featuring real-world use of both the views and og modules, for example, and the presentation of new tools, such as the Devel module, including its Firebug-like theming inspection facilities. It is hoped that this Wrox Blox will help developers squarely face all of the issues involved with upgrading from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.
Discussion on the book can take place right here, as well as on the P2P (I guess that’s Peer to Peer and not a playstation of some kind) discussion forums over at the Wrox Web Programming site (See http://p2p.wrox.com/default.asp?CAT_ID=22 . I will be setting up some topics shortly).