By Fridaysmove on

Hi all,

This our corporate property site built in Drupal: www.fridaysmove.com

The navtax and LP nodes were extremely useful in the build of Fridaysmove. We are migrating to D7 shortly and would love to hear any thoughts on the site and possibly tips for migrating to D7

Thanks for looking

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

bruceclothier’s picture

bruceclothier commented

Hi Fridaysmove,

Not a Drupal specific thing but a major mistake when moving a site is not properly preserving your urls. www.fridaysmove.com/Local/Conveyancing must still be there after the move for instance or you will suffer in the search engines. In fact fridaysmove.com/ anything should still be there after the move if it has any sort of place in the serps. Useful modules for that are Redirect (drupal.org/project/redirect) formerly Path Redirect and Pathauto (amazingly to me not yet part of Drupal core).

Good thing you are moving Fridaysmove to Drupal 7, its a vast improvement on earlier versions in my opinion. Much neater to build modules in with the new dynamic query api etc, looks like you do a bit of custom module building.

If you had moved your site to Drupal 6 you could have skipped 7 and gone straight to 8 (apparently out in about a year). Fine to skip a version, but not a great idea being 2 versions behind the latest as only the last two are supported - possibly exactly why you are now moving to 7.

You might see some performance improvements on fridaysmove.com if you get the theme right. That is the major downfall on sites, performance-wise, so make sure you get that right. There are helpers with this in things like the DEVEL module.

Good luck.
Bruce

Fridaysmove’s picture

Fridaysmove commented

Fridaysmove will definitely benefit from D7's improved speed and usability. Our development cycle is more or less continuous, and Drupal 7's easy editing of Fridaysmove blocks etc makes smaller improvements far easier to execute.

One of the downsides of this rolling development is that while Fridaysmove.com can respond quickly to changes in the market and to the needs of our customers/users, over time we can see that these changes to custom modules will eventually lead to bloating and performance issues.

A "fresh" Drupal 7 build gives us the opportunity to implement many of our UX improvements in a cleaner, more optimised environment, and we are very eager to take advantage of the performance improvements.

Any additional advice to make Fridaysmove's transition from D5 to D7 as smooth as possible is very welcome.

Thank you for you feedback.