In brick-and-mortar higher education institutions, where online learning is a grass roots effort, the quality of the course is dependent upon the professor/instructor. In other words, online environments quite often mirror classroom environments. A good classroom environment often translates to a reasonable online experience as well. The professors who put as much energy into their ability to teach and create quality instructional strategies, as they do their research, quite often deliver a better learning experience.

The process of Drupal web design has moved to the front of my thoughts recently. I am not necessarily talking about the graphic design but instead the information architecture component of the design. I started thinking about how much has changed since I was creating basic HTML sites. What constituted planning back then seems a far cry from what is needed for a content management system (CMS) where the number of pages can be significantly larger.

Fortunately, I didn't have to make the leap from basic HTML to CMS over night.

I like to distinguish between measure, metric, and measurement because when it comes to process improvement, design, benchmarking, and re-engineering, there is a difference between

By definition, a system is "a combination of related parts organized into a complex whole." According to BusinessDictionary.com, a systems approach is:

"Management thinking that emphasizes the interdependence and interactive nature of elements within and external to an organization."

When I first starting using D4, I saw many issues regarding clean urls and recommendations not to go there just yet in Drupal. So I didn't. Now that I am in D6 and clean urls shouldn't be an issue, I switched.

I didn't switch until I understood that clean URLs are similar to aliases. Meaning, if some other web site was linked to one of my unclean URLs, that link would still work. I must have read a dozen posts on DO looking for this answer. So I did a little testing and tada, everything is okay.

Converting

If you are like me, you relied on views to create your menus and lists. Unfortunately, you won't be able to reuse your D4 views if you go straight from D4 to D6.

Let me clarify. There is a feature in Views2 that allows you to convert your old views. I tried this but is didn't work.

Now you are ready to add the custom and D6 third-party modules you need. Coming from the world of D4.x, you need to be aware of something. The location for files and modules has changed.

Module Upload Location

Unlike D4, the D6 practice is to create a module directory either within your /sites/sitename directory or your /sites/all directory. Modules that will be shared across multiple sites can go in /sites/all directory.

Assuming you have completed the clean up process suggested on the previous article, you are ready to start upgrading. The following process may seem overwhelming but once you get into it, the process becomes easier (its all that practice you get).

Go Get the Drupal Installs

Go to the DO list of Drupal releases. Locate the following releases and download them to your local drive:

• D4.7.0
• D4.7.3 (cog.rusty did not include this one.