At Webdrips, we've handled complete website migrations, including HTML/CSS-based sites to Drupal, database-driven CMS-based sites to Drupal, Drupal to Drupal upgrades and migrations, Wordpress to Drupal, and even Ubercart to Drupal Commerce shopping cart migrations. There are many ways to migrate a site, so let's sit down and figure out the best way for your website. For complex migrations, there's the Drupal Migrate Module(link is external), and for simpler migrations, the Drupal Feeds module(link is external) may work just fine.
HTML/CSS to Drupal Migration
Converting from an HTML-based website to a Drupal CMS-based site is typically very straightforward, and involves the following steps:
- Review your current site and map all the various content areas and sections into the field and entity equivalent in Drupal.
- (Optional) Identify a content tagging hierarchy so that tagging may be applied during migration, even if it's not immediately put to use.
- Identify all of your current dynamic content, and decide how to best convert it to follow Drupal best practices.
- Determine if there's any new functionality that may be added out of box or with minimal additional effort. For example, Drupal provides RSS feeds out-of-box.
- Next we'll find a base theme that most closely matches the current skin of your website, yet also will allow for future enhancements and compatibility with up-and-coming specifications like HTML5 and CSS3.
- Migrate the static content. This can be completely manual or completely automated, depending on the number of pages among other factors.
- Sign-off on the data model: are all the page types and fields in place and configured properly? Are images and files placed in the proper directory (folder) on the server? Does the content editor workflow meet expectations? Typically this is straightforward when converting an HTML-based sight to CMS because existing workflows and configurations were not in place to begin with.
- "Drupalize" the code for displaying existing dynamic content.
- Apply the theme (skin) to the static/dynamic content.
- Final signoff that static and dynamic content are displaying the same (or better) than the old site.
All of the other migrations discussed below include most/all of the above steps (except for Ubercart to Drupal Commerce migrations, but the overall concepts are the same).
Legacy CMS to Drupal CMS Migration
The process for converting an existing CMS to Drupal is essentially the same as the HTML to Drupal covered above. However, an in-depth study of the PHP code to display static or dynamic content and pull in related content is required. In addition, recreating and improving the content adding/editing workflow is typically required, as content editors expect a new CMS to be as intuitive as the old one.
Legacy Database to Drupal Database Migration
If your legacy site stored content or user information in a database, that will typically need to be migrated to Drupal's database. Drupal includes a community-contributed module(link is external) to aid in this task for many databases, which significantly improves the database to database migration.
Drupal to Drupal Migration and Drupal Upgrades
By far, this is the easiest full-site migration path and may only involve running through the typical code and database updates, or may require the aid of the aforementioned Migrate or Feeds module.
For Drupal upgrades, we carefully scan all existing modules to both find out if they're being used, and determine if there's an upgrade path. Then we upgrade Drupal core, followed by one module at a time until the process is complete. The final step here is cleanup of any issues encountered during the upgrade, and in many cases re-applying some configuration that got lost in the process.
Wordpress to Drupal Migration
This is another relatively painless migration with the aid of the Drupal Wordpres Migrate(link is external) module. We've used this module, and found the process relatively painless.
Drupal Ubercart to Commerce Migration
Essentially what we're doing here is migrating a shopping cart from Ubercart to Drupal Commerce. It's not as painful a task as you might think, so please get in touch to learn more.
