What a waste of a few hours. Finally, I decided to upgrade my personal blogging site, running stuff, from Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6.x. The actual figures are from Drupal 5.15 to Drupal 6.10. I stripped the site back to the bare basics, removed all contributed modules that weren't absolutely necessary and back to the default theme, Garland. According to the update status, for version 5.x, everything was up to date.

I'm patting myself on the back in one regard in that I did a backup prior to upgrading.

Anyway, what a waste of time. Heaps and heaps of database errors, just too many to casually attempt to fix. I don't know how people survive without requisite database skills as now this has turned into a major upgrade, if I'm willing to upgrade after all. It's a problem I could overcome but it's now a decision whether I could be bothered putting the time into it.

Thank god for backups. Restoring the backup went through smoothly, within about 5 minutes, maybe a tad longer, my site is as it was hours earlier.

If anyone has some suggestions to ease the pain a little I'd love to hear from you. In my mind, I'm thinking that maybe the backup should go from Drupal 5.15 to Drupal 6.1 and then do all the necessary updates to the current version of 6.10.

Okay, the title said 45,000 posts but in reality how does converting or transferring, call it what you want, 45,936 posts from Wordpress 2.5 to Drupal 5.8 sound. I helped out a registered user HitBoy with the conversion, that is, I did it on my machine locally for him. Before I go any further here's a screen-shot of the Analyse Wordpress section.

I didn't specifically time the process but I reckon it was closer to the two hour mark than it was to the one hour mark, so transferring 45,000 posts is not a 5 minute process. Obviously, if done using remote databases it would take a little longer. How much longer, well I don't know and I'd only be guessing.

HitBoy's going to make a follow-up entry in Check My Site thread and there he'll promote his site, so at least you can see that it is possible to convert massive amounts of data.

During this process I was chatting to HitBoy about other things, as you do, and found out that he's starting a new venture, a hosting business. If you're after some free (or paid) web-hosting why not check him out at OpenSourceSetup. His site went live yesterday (Monday 29 July, 2008).

The link I provided IS NOT an affiliate link and I do not benefit in any way.

Okay, so you know all the connection details in order to connect to remote MySql databases and yet the converter claims it can't make a connection.

In order to connect to your remote MySql database(s) you need to activate the 'allow remote connections' setting at your server. If 'allow remote connections' is switched off, a connection will never be made.

Using cpanel as a guide, navigate to your database section and select "Manage Remote MySql Access". At the following screen merely enter your home computer IP address as an 'Access Host'. To simplify things further entering a % key will allow access to your MySql database from any computer.

If you can't find such a setting your hosting provider should be able to help.

Version 1.04 of the Wordpress 2.5 to Drupal 5.x/6.x converter has been released and available for download from here.

For details regarding what's new in this release check here.

By all means for any suggestions, comments or questions here is a good start.

Enjoy.

Bug fixes and enhancements for Version 1.04.

• Add new comment
• Read more
• 770 reads