Today I upgraded from Drupal 5.20 to 6.14. I've been dreading the upgrade to the Drupal 6.x series for almost 9 months because I had no idea how hard it would be or what I would lose in the migration.

The instructions on the Drupal site are fine, but they didn't prepare me for what would be different.

• Back everything up
• Deselect all non-core modules
• Select a core template
• Move the old Drupal version out of the way
• Install the new version of Drupal
• Copy your /files and /sites directory from the old installation to the new installation
• Copy other misc files like your robots.txt to the new installation
• Fix the /sites/default/settings.php
• Run the update script -- Pray

If all has gone well, you have an upgraded core. Now for the tedious part. Start upgrading each module one at a time, running your update script between each one.

After upgrading every module that had a Drupal 6.x version, here is what I lost: