Du Vien Trang is a Freelance Web Designer / Developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. This is his portfolio, blog and his digital playground.

You will find that at the stage of upgrading Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 that some of your modules will cease to work. This is because modules must be developed to work with Drupal 6 due to changes within the Drupal API for each new release. If this happens then you will need to first check to see if there is a Drupal 6 release for the modules that you have installed by visiting the Drupal modules page.

If it exist then download the module and install it. Otherwise, you may help out and start porting the module so it will run on drupal 6. This isn't too difficult of a task, thanks to the core developers that have made it easier than before.

Porting Drupal 5.x module

Below is a great screencast taking you through a step-by-step process of how you can port any modules to Drupal 6 if it has not yet been done.

Topics covered include:

• How to tell the module portage status of your Drupal site with the Upgrade Status module.
• How to perform basic community research to determine the actual porting status of your modules.
• Overview of the amazing Coder module and how to configure it.
• Where to find more information about changes between Drupal versions.
• How to use Coder module to convert a simple module from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, step by step.
• How to test to ensure the porting status was a success.

Big thanks to Angie (Webchick) Byron of Lullabot for the creating the video screencast.

Upgrading from Drupal 5.x to 6.x

This screencast should help you to quickly upgrade from Drupal 5.x to 6.x

Thanks to Gregg Knaddison for creating the above screencast.

You may find that some of your modules will not work any more after an upgrade. To resolve this please read the next following article on Porting Drupal 5 modules.

Before we can begin any work on Drupal, we must first prepare and install Drupal either on your web host server or locally on your own machine for testing.

Below is video clips to guide you through on how to install Drupal 6 (the process is pretty the same for Drupal 5):

Installing Drupal 6

Thanks to Addison (Add1sun) Berry of Lullabot.

Resources:

• Download Drupal 6
• Filezilla, a free FTP program
• phpmyadmin, most web hosting provider will provide this on your hosting package

In 2000, permanent Internet connections were at a premium for University of Antwerp students, so Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder set up a wireless bridge between their student dorms to share Hans's ADSL modem connection among eight students. While this was an extremely luxurious situation at that time, something was missing: There was no means to discuss or share simple things.

This inspired Dries to work on a small news site with a built-in web board, allowing the group of friends to leave each other notes about the status of the network, to announce where they were having dinner, or to share some noteworthy news items.

The software did not have a name until the day after Dries moved out after graduation. The group decided to put the internal website online so they could stay in touch, keep sharing interesting findings, and narrate snippets of their personal lives. While looking for a suitable domain name, Dries settled for 'drop.org' after he made a typo to see if the the name 'dorp.org' was still available. Dorp is the Dutch word for 'village', which was considered a fitting name for the small community.

Once drop.org was established on the Web, its audience changed as the members began talking about new web technologies, such as moderation, syndication, rating, and distributed authentication. Drop.org slowly turned into a personal experimentation environment, driven by the discussions and flow of ideas. The discussions about these web technologies were tried out on drop.org itself as new additions to the software running the site.

It was only later, in January 2001, that Dries decided to release the software behind drop.org as "Drupal." The purpose was to enable others to use and extend the experimentation platform so that more people could explore new paths for development. The name Drupal, pronounced "droo-puhl," derives from the English pronunciation of the Dutch word "druppel," which means "drop."

To learn more about the history of Drupal, see also the Drupal videos from Drupalcon (2006) in Vancouver.

[Taken from the Drupal Handbook]

Drupal an Open Source (licensed under the GPL) web application project driven by a community of dedicated core team members, contributors and end users that use it daily to build and power their own websites.

Over the years, Drupal has seen a rapid growth in many large and high profile organisations (commercial and non-profit) using Drupal as the CMS of choice to run and power their own websites.

The documentation you'll find here will hopefully help you to familiarise with using Drupal to build and power your own website.