Here is my transition from Wordpress 2.8 to Drupal 6.20. Fun Scavenger Hunts provides free scavenger hunts for various ages, locations and themes. This post outlines why Drupal was selected and the process of transition.
Starting Point - Before Drupal
Previously, the site was running on Wordpress 2.8 (you can see a screenshot of the old site here). However, Wordpress was lacking a few items that were required or needed to be added in the future. The list of requirements included.
- Associating an age and gender with each scavenger hunt.
- Providing a filter to search for specific hunts by age, gender and/or hunt category.
- Users should register for the site to receive "scavenger hunt clues" or "printable PDF".
- The site should have comments and the ability for a forum in the future.
- Users should be able to rate each scavenger hunt.
- Accepting user submitted scavenger hunts
Moving to Drupal
All the requirements were completed, however, accepting user submitted scavenger hunts has been shelved until an increase in user-base is achieved.
The scavenger hunts are created as a new content type with CCK fields for title, description, clues, age, gender, category, image and pdf's. This provides the details needed to grab data using views and display it in meaningful ways. A few other key modules included the Views Slideshow (frontpage) and five-star modules (rating each scavenger hunt). Basic template modification and user permissions allowed the "scavenger hunt clues" and/or "printable PDF" to be displayed only for authenticated users. Anonymous users are given the option of logging in to receive the clues.
In order for a smooth transition I used the Path Redirect module to take all the Wordpress posts and 301 redirect them to their new Drupal paths.
All in all, Fun Scavenger hunts is a much more dynamic, functional and interactive website. Users are now able to rate each scavenger hunt, filter scavenger hunts by age, gender and category and can register for the site to keep track of changes.
