Our client, a prominent national nonprofit in the US, had built a custom Drupal platform for their 50-odd state-level affiliates. Now they needed to get all those affiliates onto the platform by bringing forward their existing web content. The catch: each of the affiliates had a different customized site. Not only that, but the sites were built with a huge variety of content management system (CMS) platforms, from WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla to various lesser known CMSs. How were we going to get all these sites onto the new Drupal-based custom platform?
Working closely with staff at our client, we designed and implemented a migration strategy that successfully got the state-level affiliates up and running on the new platform.
Needs assessment and migration plan
Our first step was to do a needs assessment. We surveyed all groups planning to come onto the new platform and assessed their legacy content as well as the platform they were migrating off of.
On this basis we produced a migration plan, laying out a set of recommended solutions for meeting the diverse needs of platform adopters.
Migration modules
To help automate the migration progress, we produced a set of three custom migration modules that covered the majority of use cases.
- A migration module supporting CSV text file sources. This set of migrations would be run on all sites.
- A WordPress-to-Drupal migration module, extending the contributed WordPress Migrate module.
- A Drupal-to-Drupal migration module.
Documentation
We provided detailed documentation for both end users and developers on how to use and extend the migrations.
Implementation
Working with individual affiliates, we migrated them onto the new platform and provided support and training on how to do post-migration content cleanup to prepare for site relaunch.