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Switching to Drupal - Expert advice needed

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dandy1 - May 3, 2008 - 14:04

Hi all,

I'm new to Drupal and this is my first post here.

I'm playing around with Drupal (6) for the past day, trying to see if it can fit my needs. I would like to switch an exiting tailored made site engine to Drupal CMS. The site's layout and concepts is similar to sites like youtube (which I'm sure all of you are familiar with). in a nutshell, here are my site specs:

  • the site contains thousands of articles.
  • each article contains: a collection of “related tags”, a thumbnail image, content, title, comments.
  • A tag page displays a list of articles that has the tag word in they're “related tags” collection. for each articles the first line of text is shown, it's “related tags” and the thumbnail image.
  • Tag words are stored in a table, each tag has it's id and title example: id=1234 title=oranges
  • Each article has it's own id and can be referenced by entering www.myurl.com/article.php?id=1234 (I will have to keep this since my url's are already indexed under google, I do not want to loose the ranking)

    • Now, I'm looking for the best way to import all this data into a Drupal system, I've looked into Drupal's content types and CCK, I understand I can create a data type for my articles with the requested fields which is a good start! I guess I will need to write code in order to implement this, I would love it if people could point me to some refrences to modules, articles, tutirals and other resources.

    Above all I would like to ask the exprenced Durpal users here, how would you do such a task...where do I start?

    Thanks in Adnvce
    Dandy

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    Should be easy

    VValdo - May 5, 2008 - 17:34

    You just need to write or modify a script that uses the Drupal API to take each of the articles and add it to Drupal. Then do the same with your "related tags" which you might choose to store using taxonomy.

    If you want to keep the same article ID #s, you could probably even do that, though your script would need to make sure the ID#s remain consistent.

    Incidentally, google will re-index your site on request and remap to all the new links. I think google prefers a straight /path/subpath/link w/ "clean urls" as opposed to the article.php?id=1234 method, but you can probably get your old links to work as well...

    The only site conversion program I know well is one I modified that converts php-nuke to drupal... on 5.x. But I recommend you take a look at api.drupal.org if you get a chance. It has all the various functions and stuff you can use to get drupal to import your content..

    CCK isn't ready yet for Drupal 6, although I believe there is an alpha or beta around...

    Good luck,
    W

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