Artful Robot - websites, databases and open source cunning to help you change the world

The path I took was

1. Migrate my site to a test server
2. Upgrade CiviCRM from 3.4 to 4.1 on the existing Drupal 6 site.
3. Upgrade Drupal from 6 to 7 while simultaneously updating the CiviCRM codebase for Drupal 7

I found lots of pages on CiviCRM's wiki about various upgrades, but apparently one's not been written for the upgrade of D6 to D7. So thought it would be worth sharing this.

Migrating to a test server

Believe me, you need a practise run at this upgrade, but even this first step is ridiculously fiddly!

Animated GIFs are a 90s hangover that will not go away! I was asked to make an animated banner 728×90 at under 50kB. Quite a tall order.

Inkscape

I designed the animation in my favourite vector drawing package, Inkscape. Each frame was a different layer; I could turn off and on layers one at a time to edit the separate frames. Obviously this is only useful for very simple animations, but I needed to keep changes between frames to a minimum to keep the file size down anyway.

Drupal is very themable. There's so many ways to theme content that it can be very confusing to remember/figure out what's responsible for what. And then if the stock theming capabilities aren't enough, once you've installed Omega (and possibly Delta and Context) and Display Suite, they haystack's size increases exponentially.

I keep finding that things that are supposed to make things simpler or easier, actually don't.

I needed to be able to add a new activity record to every contact in my search results.

Here's how I used a CiviCRM hook to add a function to the list of tasks you can perform on a set of search results.

I was really glad to be working to create Easy Green Print with a friendly local company who are the leading light in environmental printing. It ticked a lot of boxes for me: