Getting Forked
Since last weekend, I spent my evenings manually moving content on deninet. It many ways, it was an exhausting process, but it gave me something to do while I suffer through the last two seasons of Star Trek: Voyager. Let me chart how I arrived at this point.
Over vacation time in December, I decided to conduct a little experiment. I would attempt to upgrade the current deninet website from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. When I had attempted this a year ago, it did not go well. The upgrade process crashed spectactually, leaving me with a lump of a database. Thankfully I was doing this on a local copy, and not the live site. I had speculated that in the interviening year, Drupal would have ironed out a lot of the edge cases I originally ran into. So, I copied off the site and tried again. To my astonishment, it worked.
This created a dilemma. The previous year I had created a new deninet website by manually copying content from the version based on Drupal 6 to the new one based on Drupal 7. When all the features I needed to run the site were available, I'd switch to the new site. I had maintained the D7 fork from time to time, manually importing nodes and to make sure the two sites where in sync. At the time, this seemed the best way to go. I would lose things like comments and break all the URLs, but the end would be a good move.
Except that the new site never seemed to get anywhere.
I had reservations about the URLs and the comments. While I could bury my feelings, claming it was for "the greater good", it still bothered me. There was the bigger issue that I really wasn't getting anywhere with the D7 site. It sat and languished, while I couldn't resolve the issue.
After successfully upgrading the site, I began to wonder if I could take a more fluid approach. I used Pathauto to create URLs that would be the same for both the current D6 site, as well as a D7 site -- upgraded or new. The biggest problem was images.