Lessons from the real world of the Zimmer Twins - Upgrading from Drupal 4.6 -> 6.x

Drupal has been the CMS of choice for zinc Roe Design since James Walker worked with them to build the original version of the Zimmer Twins for Teletoon, a Canadian television channel. Over the years that I worked for them, it went through many tweaks (hacks?) to Drupal 4.6 for performance, and also became a multisite installation for the site to be broadcast on ABC in Australia and Qubo/NBC in USA. Last year, I undertook the challenge of upgrading a site directly from Drupal 4.6.x to Drupal 6.x to step out of hacking core drupal and to use even more of the awesome features from the drupal community. I will give a behind-the-scenes on the process involved in upgrading the entire set of sites into its current iteration.

So if you’re interested in the mechanics of community content management this will (hopefully) be a fun little case study. The Zimmer Twins site(s) in total has over 500,000 members and 1.2 million nodes making the update quite the process.