StressFree website migrated to Drupal
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Over the weekend I have migrated the StressFree website across to the Drupal content management system. The move was spurred on by the shortcomings I kept finding in Joomla, the desire to be able to tag content and the knowledge that the next upgrade to Joomla 1.5 would require almost starting from scratch.
I have tried my best to maintain all the legacy links so hopefully the old Joomla and static file links should resolve okay. Overall it went really smoothly, Drupal is a little bit more difficult to get your head around compared to Joomla but now that I've made the switch I am very glad. There has been limited loss of functionality in the switch but a tonne of new features are now available:
- Firstly I can now tag content and there are tag clouds available. This should make finding content a lot easier though in the future I wouldn't mind finding a 'related tags' type module for Drupal.
- Also it looks like Drupal's content search engine actually works (compared to Joomla/Mambo's effort).
- On the administration side I now have an xmlrpc interface for writing content which will mean I can finally give Ecto some real use instead of always working through a web browser for publishing content.
- The new comment engine looks a lot better than the Joomla version as it supports html comments and replies.
- The 'printer friendly' option is far superior than Joomla's. Not only is it tidier but it also has the ability to extract hyperlinks from content and print them below the article as footnotes (which is very cool).
One piece of functionality that Joomla has over Drupal is their {mospagebreak} tag and its ability to auto-generate table of contents for long articles. It does make navigating larger documents a little less user-friendly but it is a small price to pay for the extra functionality gains.
Migration-wise it looks like content has come across okay. Some of the comments are a little messed up due to the significant formatting differences between the two systems. Over the next week I'll go through all the comments and tidy them up so there is no confusion.
Migration of data
Hi, it looks as if you've taken a good job migrating your content + comments from joomla to drupal.
Could you provide me/us with some extra technical details on how you performed the migration. I'm sure many people would find that usefull.
Did you use any existing tutorials/guidelines
What was the hardest part to tackle.
Did you do a PURE SQL migration from the old joomla DB to the new Drupal DB, or did you use some import/export tools to help you with that?
Migration was not easy
Migration from Joomla to Drupal is not a painless process simply because there isn't any CMS data standards. The 'Migrating from Joomla/Mambo' page on the Drupal website is a useful resource but there are no automatic tools.
I handled my migration manually using SQL commands. This meant getting to understand the relevant Drupal and Joomla data-structures but at the end of the day it worked out. Fortunately both use the same user password hash so migrating of passwords is possible.
The approach you take will vary on the type of quantity of content on the existing website. If the site is relatively small with very few comments then it is just as easy to manually copy and paste the content over. The end result is a lot cleaner and it provides a good opportunity to refresh what is there. However if the site is large with lots of comments you will need to take an automated approach. If this is the case then factor in a lot of testing time afterwards to ensure the content has come across cleanly and has not resulted in unforeseen issues.