Waterloo Drupal Group Meeting: Friday 01 August 2008. Porting * to Drupal

We have a special guest presenter for our August meeting. Emma Jane Hogbin will join us and share an encore presentation of her DrupalCamp Talk "Moving In: or how to port your content from * to Drupal."

This topic was a huge hit at DrupalCamp and we are thrilled to be able to have Emma present it with lots of extra time for Q&A.

You've decided to make the switch to Drupal. Fantastic! Only one problem: you have to figure out how to move your content from the old database to Drupal. Although there are many import/export modules available it's sometimes good to know what's happening behind the scenes. This session will walk you through my adventures of porting community Web sites into Drupal.

The talk will include:

* exporting usable data from your old site;
* using CCK to create the right home for your new content;
* using existing import modules (specifically: import html, node import and user import); and
* importing content "by hand" using MySQL command line magic.

We will also touch on some of the headaches I ran into in keeping data synchronized on very active community sites during the development phase.

This session is perfect for people who are preparing to migrate their Web site to Drupal and also people who are new to database management but want to know more about how things work behind the scenes. Of course if you're already a pro at data migration, please bring your stories and suggestions!