First Avenue Rocking with a New Look and D6 upgrade
Sorry, I couldn’t resist the play on the words. This storied Minneapolis nightclub has been a music mecca since the 70’s, entering the national spotlight in the mid 80’s when it helped launch Prince and was the venue for the classic movie Purple Rain. Level OS first launched the site around 6 years ago on a custom ASP.NET platform (cut me some slack, it was my first project with my own company!). It was migrated to Drupal about 2 and a half years ago, right around v5.2. That version of the site featured a custom Ubercart integration allowing the club to sell both tickets and sightline seats to events, along with regular merchandise, heavy use of CCK and Views for features like blogs, forums, and galleries, sample audio tracks, and an online community. In the ensuing two years, both the code base and design lacked the flexibility the site needed, so we updated both. Side note: It’s amazing what passed in my book for Drupal best practices 3 years ago! The upgrade process was, well, extremely painful to be blunt, and this coming from a fairly experienced Druapler. The challenges we encountered included:
