So, last week I decided that it was time to upgrade from Drupal 6, since it was past it's end of life for support. I had dabbled with Drupal 7 a bit on my laptop, and had read through a couple of Drupal 7 books over the past year or so... The CPanel Softalicious script installer kept nagging me that there was an upgrade to perform, and it appeared to have a script to go from 6 to 7... I took backups of all of the MySQL databases, put both of my sites into "Maintenance Mode" and disabled all of the non-core scripts, then let CPanel run the upgrade...

Boom! It didn't get through the update script without errors, and I decided to try the update.php script, and that threw errors as well.. I poked at for a couple of hours, trying to work through the issues. The first problem is that Drupal 6 kept a list of blocked IPs in a table, which Drupal 7 doesn't have, at least not when it tries running the update. I was able to find a tip with a script to create the missing table, which got me a bit further, but it continued to have issues.

I finally decided to try jumping up to Drupal 8, which has an updated "Migrate and Upgrade" module which supports both version 6 and 7. I restored the database back to their original condition, then created two fresh installs of Drupal 8 in separate directories. I enabled the migrate utility, and let it convert from the Drupal 6 databases, which was (more) successful.

Now I am struggling to put things back like they were. One of the issues is that none of the page views will display the "body" field, where most of the content is located. From the searching I have done on the web, it seems to be due to multi-language support in Drupal 7 and 8, but my Drupal 6 content isn't tagged with the language, so it may not be able to determine how to display the content?

Anyway, please bear with me as I study up on Drupal 8, and learn more about how "Views" work now, so that I can get the content to display again... There are a few things that are broken, but I'm continuing to work to fix everything.