By truenorf on

Fairly new to Drupal. Planning to upgrade an existing community website (built on siteframe CMS) by porting it to D7. Site has the following features:

  • Closed to anonymous users
  • Members maintain a profile with a few custom fields
  • Members can post articles for others to read
  • Members can post items to swap with other members
  • Swaps expire after a date specified by the poster
  • Articles and swaps must be allocated to a category
  • Articles and swaps can be viewed filtered by category
  • Swaps can be viewed sorted by expiry date

I'm fairly sure that D7 can do all this for me (but couldn't find custom profile fields at first glance, and not sure about the filtering and sorting). But that aside, the existing site has a few thousand members associated with even more thousands of articles and swaps. Too many to be bringing across to the new site by copy and paste!

And so to my question: Is it going to be a nightmare to import the existing users, articles and swaps and have the correct articles and swaps associated with each D7 user profile?

I'm going to keep searching and experimenting, but if anyone has any insight or experience in this area I'd be pleased to hear your thoughts.

Many thanks,

Rich

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

d_l’s picture

d_l commented

I have a broadly similar requirement .. to import many different sources.

I am no expert in drupal but I'll share my own research.

I'm using an external repository and uploading content into a WebDAV folder.
I use Amaya (WYSIWYG editor) to preview the imported content and then PUT into the repository.
Then I use simple one liner include_once statements in PHP blocks to include the external content.

But first the external content has to be parsed to retain only the body.
I use regex filters so that only the body is retained and the head stripped out.

This works nicely but with many sources of external documents an automation tool is needed to avoid - as you point out - manual copying and pasting of content into the drupal fields.

I've posted a question on this here .. http://drupal.org/node/1324032

The technical issues to be ironed out include keeping the imported styles intact so that the imported styles do not conflict with the drupal parent (wrapper) styles.

For this I also parse the css files to keep them unique.

Some discussion on this here .. http://drupal.org/node/1302632

I've enabled WebDAV in Apache so that content can be externally composed and using Amaya PUT into a repository .. which is then "included" into blocks.

It is the workflow for automation of this process which I'm trying to understand.

This is all in an experimental stage and there might be other ways of importing external CMS (see below).

...

Here is a discussion I found on generic import / export modules .. http://groups.drupal.org/node/21338

There is the migrate module here .. http://drupal.org/project/migrate

truenorf’s picture

truenorf commented

Thank you for the reply. I found migrate shortly after posting my original message and have spent a bit of time investigating it. Looks like a promising (if heavyweight!) solution. I'm fortunate in that I have OOP and PHP experience and the source database contains mostly plain text fields, so no complications with source styles interfering with Drupal CSS. Nevertheless, it's a pretty daunting task!

Good luck with your migration. And thanks again for the useful links.

All the best,

Rich