Jul
25
2008
Here at pingVision we've largely switched over to making all of our clients' websites with Drupal 6 - there's a number of advantages in doing that, but sometimes there's one major disadvantage: The website they want would be great with module X, but module X doesn't have a Drupal 6 version yet.
In those cases, we convert 'em ourselves, and post a patch appropriately. I wrapped up updating the wonderful Invite module to Drupal 6, and that made me think back on the various updates we at pingVision have done so far:
- NodeCarousel
- NodeQueue
- Favorite Nodes
- Custom Error
- Profile Privacy
- Thickbox
- DrupalVB
- Invite
- And I'm working on upgrades for a few of the User Points Contributed Modules, especially userpoints_invite.
It's really kind of fun converting a module to Drupal 6 - for one, you really get a good feeling for how that module works. You also can learn some interesting features of Drupal's extensive API that you haven't run into before, and when you're done you've helped out the whole community.
Give it a try! Find a useful module that doesn't have a patch for Drupal 6 yet, get a copy of the most recent code, and open your browser to Converting 5.x Modules to 6.x and work your way along. Also, it can help to get a copy of Coder and use that to look for any changes you've overlooked.
Attached: A slide presentation that I did for a local Drupal meetup on upgrading modules to Drupal 6.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Upgrading_Drupal_6.pdf | 106.83 KB |
Comments
Anonymous writes:
Check out the deadwood project. Soon to be udpdated release that will cover the majoring of the 80 changes described in the conversion document.
Give it a try, post feedback, and help write some of the conversions scripts.
John Fiala writes:
Hmm... That does look like a neat idea - I'm a little busy this weekend with the Drupalcamp, but i think I'll be taking another look at it soon! Thanks for the pointer.
Anonymous writes:
Nice. Thanks!
Vint writes:
Great to hear someone's working on the port to 6.0 for userpoints_invite. Can't wait for it to be available! (but sadly enough, am no way capable of doing that myself)