I spent a good bit of yesterday (and a portion of today) upgrading my blog to a development version of Drupal 6.

Now, to be fair, not all of that time was upgrading. I also downloaded, installed and subsequently tweaked a copy of Arun Kale's The Morning After theme, a WordPress design that I found in a Drupal-6-compatible form at hyrme.com, thanks to panis.

Drupal 6, having had two release candidates as of this post, will no doubt soon be released. I wanted to try the upgrade from 5 to 6 for myself, and since this is a non-mission-critical site with few contributed modules, it was an obvious choice for upgrade.

My experience upgrading went pretty well; all of the few issues I had were caused by something I did, or didn't, do. While it was not completely trouble-free, note that I didn't really follow the instructions in UPGRADE.txt to the letter, but instead, followed a looser set of "this ought to work" internal guidelines I pretty much made up as I went.

On upgrading.

• I did move my very few contributed modules and themes out of the path of the new upgrade. And, I did put my site in maintenance mode before I began.
• I did not -- though -- disable those contributed modules and themes before I moved them out of my /sites/all directory. Oops. And, I didn't realize that one of the themes I moved had been set as my administrative theme. If I had disabled it properly, I probably wouldn't have had PHP notices on the /admin page. (Not that notices are a big deal, or that they would occur in a release with a different error reporting level.) Nothing a bit of manual cleanup in the system and variable tables didn't cure, though. I'll remember to do this next time.
• Every update query ran flawlessly. The few small issues I did experience were all related to not exactly following the instructions, or small, known issues with the few contributed modules and themes I did install.

On modules.

• I use DHTML Menu for a dynamic Navigation menu (the Navigation menu block is set to only display for authenticated users). I did have a small issue with disabled items appearing in the menu (like "Compose tips"), but there was already a (fixed) issue in the queue on this topic and upgrading to the HEAD version of the module fixed it right up.

On themes.

• I really like the "magazine" style of this theme. Panis did the original port to Drupal 6 from the original WordPress theme The Morning After by Arun Kale, but has not made it available as a project on Drupal.org (though I wish he would). His D6 version is available for download from his site under the terms of the GPL.
• The theme comes bundled with a small module that creates "Categories," "Recent Posts," "Asides," and "Featured" blocks as shown on the front page of this site. Including a custom module like this is nothing new, of course, but it is something I wish more themes did. It really helps to create a tight, consistent, cohesive look.

Edit: I had originally incorrectly attributed the design of The Morning After to panis, instead of its original author Arun Kale. Fortunately, panis was kind enough to let me know, and I've reflected his comment in the post.