Updating content after major upgrade from 5 to 6 (changes to production site need to be reflected in dev environment)

Question

I have been tasked with a major upgrade from D5 to D6. The upgrade is now complete and fully themed on my development server. The current production site is very busy, with dozens of nodes being added on a daily basis. I need to somehow sync the content from the D5 site to the D6 site, and am wondering if there is any modules to assist or recommended way of doing this? I just need to retrieve the content and Ubercart orders from the last month and port them to the D6 site. Thanks for any help!!

Answer 1

I have not found a better alternative to migrate module till date and I have done lots of migration including ubercart order migration. It has served me well for:

• ASP.Net (MSSQL server) -> Drupal migration
• D6 -> D7 Migration
• Rails (MySQL) -> Drupal Migration

There are tons of other modules like node_export, views bonus pack, uuid features, deploy that will let you export content out of drupal site but nothing scales better than migrate module. Having said that, its some effort as you need to write your migration classes, but it comes with excellent features like:

• Incremental Migration ( you can test your migration class, with small subset of content)
• Rollback ( In case you realize you missed something )
• Solid drush interface.

Also, once you get a hang of it you keep appreciating the fact that it always work. It knows what has been imported, it reports on warnings during migration, gives you a status update on your migration. Can't recommend it enough!! and the best part is minimum downtime, you keep syncing content till the last moment.

Answer 2

I don't think there's an easy one-click way to do it. Check out http://drupal.org/node/859434