Finally made the change from D6 to D7

Am keeping all my fingers crossed that all will be ok. I've been using Dolphin since version 5.3 and it was always such a palava when it came to upgrade time.

You may laugh but I have been preparing for this change-over since November. With past upgrades it was much less of an issue as the site was free to use. At the start of the year I introduced a membership fee to help cover my costs which in turn brought an extra layer of pressure at upgrade time.

I began installing test versions of the site. I must have created over 20 versions, testing out the modules and features as I went while trying to get the desired look.

On my D6 site, I had so many custom fields as well which needed to be transferred over and through my testing I soon discovered that the migration tool didn't seem to transfer everything over. There was always something missing that lead me to take another path which I thought I'd let you know about in case you never thought of trying it.

I basically started with a basic installtion of D7, added the modules I required, then began to manually rebuild all the fields from scratch. Once I was reasonably sure I had the site to the point I was happy with, I then carried out the migration from D6 to D7.

It does work if you decide to follow this method, though it.s early days yet and I am remaining hopeful.

One important thing that did not migrate over was the previous emails. Now I am not sure if that was due to my method of building the new site or if the migration tool doesn't include that. If it doesn't then it should. I had to figure out how to do that myself.

D7 has two extra columns as well ('Type' and 'Trash') making the job just a bit more challenging. To a MySQL expert it might seem easy, but I am no expert. Managed it in the end and decided to go live with the newly upgraded D7 version of my site today.

Just wanted to say thank you to Zarcon and Anton for their help.

NOTE: One thing I did learn is that if something doesn't appear how it should, or it doesn't appear at all, then try clearing the cache...............lol!

Wish me luck!!!