I have to upgrade website running very old version of Drupal (cannot even find out which version is that, but I guess it is even before 5) to the newest one? Is that possible? If yes, how to approach this?
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I have to upgrade website running very old version of Drupal (cannot even find out which version is that, but I guess it is even before 5) to the newest one? Is that possible? If yes, how to approach this?
The Drupal web site makes it clear that you cannot skip major versions when doing version upgrades.
See this page: http://drupal.org/upgrade/
(it talks about not being able to skip from v5 to v7; it doesn’t even mention v4!)
So if you do manage to upgrade your site all the way from v4.x to v7, one thing is for certain – it’s going to be a long-winded process.
The other thing that is going to be a major issue for you is that the Drupal module ecosystem has changed radically in the space of time between v4.x and v7. Many modules that you’ll be using in v4 will be either unsupported in later versions, or not have an upgrade path, so you may have a lot of manual hacking to do.
On the flip side, there are likely to be newer modules that can do things in recent versions of Drupal which were not possible in older version or were done in a very different way, and you may find yourself wanting to use some of those modules instead of ones you’ve got in place. Again, lots of manual work I forsee for you.
In summary, I would suggest that upgrading from such a long way back to the current version is going to be extremely difficult. You may find it easier to start again from scratch and rebuild everything. I’m sure you could get some data imported from the old site to maintain continuity.
One further thing I would add is that this isn’t a Drupal-specific problem, so please don’t blame the Drupal developers if you struggle with this upgrade – you’ll get this issue with virtually any software you run if you don’t keep it up-to-date. Try upgrading a Windows95 machine to Windows Vista and you’ll see what I mean.