A decade ago, I hosted a website for my partner, so that she could post photos and such for her family to see. She didn't use it much, and, in 2017, the hosting software reached end-of-life. So, I shut the site down, planning to upgrade the software and resurrect the site later.
Well, life got in the way, and I never did resurrect the site. Until now.
In my blog article "Websites in Minutes", I talk about the steps I used to put together a memorial website for a recently-passed friend. I volunteered to create that site in part because I knew that I could construct it and eventually release it to the internet in minutes. Such is the power of an internet-exposed Linux system running an Apache webserver.
But, to build and release the site took some preparation and configuration of that system. I'd like to tell you how I did it.
Just over a week ago, a good friend passed away. I wanted to do something special as a memorial for him, so I put together a website where his friends and family can post pictures and stories about him.
That's it. The last website has been moved to Drupal 6.
This morning, I took a mysqldump backup of the last backlevel public site (migrated to Drupal 5, yesterday), and created a new "internal" site from it. Using the same magic incantations as before (log on, disable modules, change httpd vhosts, update.php, enable modules), I managed to get this last site running properly on Drupal 6, internally.
With my Drupal 6 installation upgraded to the latest patch level, I've decided to make an effort and move the last Drupal 4 site up to Drupal 6 by Christmas. As I commented before, this isn't an easy task, as the site has a fair amount of content that I don't want to lose, and uses features that I don't want to disable. And I can't move directly to Drupal 6; I have to transition through Drupal 5 first.
The move will occur in two parts:
move the site from Drupal 4 to Drupal 5, and get most of the bugs out there, and
I mentioned before that I was going to rebuild my partner's website in Drupal 6 rather than migrate it from Drupal 4. And that I did. But, as any man can tell you, it is a woman's prerogative to change her mind, and this website rebuild was no exception.
