In the last months, I had tried to upgrade our Drupal-based triathlon team website from Drupal 4.1 to the current version 3 times. All 3 attemps ended with a non-working installation (the thing would refuse to output anything more than <html><body></body></html>, which is very useful).
I had posted about the problem in the Drupal support forums, but nobody was able to help, and I was quite lost. Yesterday I decided to try again, and got in #Drupal, where UnConeD put me on the right track about what was going wrong. Apparently, the core of Drupal wasn't liking something that was wrong in my database, and after some fix ups, the website started spewing errors, which was a relief, and more as they were fixed progressively. It ended working more or less, but comments and adding material wasn't working still. By pure luck, I got Vertice, the Drupal PostgreSQL maintainer, to assist me a bit, and now the database is in an acceptable state. We have lost the personal info for our users (strange, that that wasn't suppossedly affected by any upgrade, but maybe I wiped it out when I nuked parts of the database to fix it up). This probably happened because I insisted in installing Drupal 4.1 on PostgreSQL, when pgsql support was a bit flaky at that time (it one became officially supported in 4.2). Probably my database was bogus since day 1, and with the upgrade errors it has become evident. We still need to get our theme fixed or go ahead and write our new theme one of these days.
Our duathlon season started last Sunday, and it could have gone better. Personally, I ran quite badly (it was too fucking cold to be half-naked out there) but the worst part is that some of my team mates came in first place, and were disqualified because some asshole accussed them of not having completed the 4 required laps in the cycling segment, and one judge believed them (or was interested in believing them). A very dissapointing start of the 2004 season, although it might motivate my affected team mates to run a lot better in the coming races.
