Migrating from Proprietary CMS to Drupal - Why & How

Posted by Jon Stroz on June 10, 2010 at 7:17pm

Hey Folks,

I'm putting together a presentation for an upcoming webinar on migrating from a proprietary CMS to Drupal, why do it, and how to do. I was wondering if anyone out there has any information on this or if there is a good site I can reference for more information.

Thanks,

-jon

Comments

White paper about migration coming soon from Acquia

Posted by tgeller on June 11, 2010 at 2:12pm

Hi, Jon! Funny you should ask this, as I'm working with Acquia (http://acquia.com) to produce a white paper, "Migrating a Web Site to Drupal: Smoothly Transfer Content, Users, Interface, and Metadata". We're still working through it, but I hope it'll be out within a few weeks.

In short, here are a few tips:

Move in the following order: Users, Taxonomy, Other metadata, Content.
Get your data into MySQL first (if it's not there already)
Beware troublesome entities within the data itself, such as embedded HTML/PHP and eight-bit characters. Use standard tools such as HTML Tidy to convert them.
The Migrate module (http://drupal.org/project/migrate) is your friend. Particularly consider Version 2, which is quite different (and more advanced) than the Migrate 1
Do lots of testing, using actual site data. Things rarely go right the first time.

Good luck!

Tom Geller * Oberlin * San Francisco * TomGeller.com
Author/Presenter, Drupal video series at lynda.com
Creator of materials for Drupal-focused companies