Our main Teaching & Learning Centre website runs on Drupal, with extensive use of CCK, Views, Events and Signup modules. The site had been running on the Drupal 4.7, with only security patches applied. But it was starting to act up (content was suddenly not showing up), so I decided to pull everything up to the current 5.2 line, with updated modules. It’s an easy enough upgrade. When it works.
The CCK update appears to have really botched things. As in, most of our custom content types are now missing data for several of their fields. The data’s safe – I can see it in the database – but it’s not showing up when viewing or editing the nodes. Annoying.
So, my task over the next couple of days (hopefully much shorter than that) is to debug wtf went wrong, and figure out how to manually upgrade the various CCK database tables from wherever they were to where they need to be for 5.2. Fun stuff.
Also, the embedded Views have decided to go TU, so I get to debug wtf is going on there, as well.
Thankfully, I have backups of the data, so can play a bit if needed, but I need to leave the main site up and live to support workshop registrations while I fix things. It’s taken much of today to get the site to the state it’s in now. Haven’t even had a chance to check all of my feeds yet. The horrors!
I may need to dig up one of those circa-1995 “Under Construction” animated GIF images for the site in the meantime…
Update: Thanks to a tip from Webchick, I got the CCK tables manually reconstructed. All I had to do was rename the tables as per the pattern described. It looks like the 4.7 – 5.x upgrade path for CCK got really complicated, and may have been overlooked. My Drupal 4.7.7 site was fully patched, all modules were up to date, as was core. Upgrading from a fully patched 4.7.7 to 5.2 just plain didn’t work, from the perspective of CCK. Turns out it was a pretty easy fix, but still, a bit annoying. Huge thanks to Webchick for the tip. It’s amazing just how active and helpful the Drupal community is.
My last big issue is wrt embedded Views in several nodes. They appear to be ignoring arguments (but not all of the views are misbehaving, making it a bit harder to diagnose). That’s my task for today, to get the rest of the site behaving properly. Then to fix some layout issues that are unrelated to the Drupal upgrade (the UCalgary theme we had been using was a 4.7 variety, and the 5.0 variety has subtly different css, and lacks our custom stuff).