This article is about the theory of template development. A topic, which at its best, is dry and wonkish. My goal is to provoke thought and discussion but mostly to prevent others from having to continuously wander through this hedge maze until they invariably come to the same end. Besides that, there may be a better solution still that someone else has come up with.
So while preparing my Sitecore system for a future upgrade to 6.5 I noticed that there were a lot of fields that were using deprecated field types. It's not a surprise since the original system was built on 5.3 but it's one of those things that's easily overlooked. It can seem daunting at first to update all the templates on a running system but the field types have more to do with how the fields are managed than whether or not the data gets removed from the database. The good news is that the deprecated fields all have an analogous field that it can be upgraded to easily. Well, except the server file field, which I have not found any matching field for but that's probably not being used by anyone but Sitecore. Here's what I've come up with as a cheatsheet that should speed up your upgrade a bit.