By robby1066 on

I have a client who's looking to migrate the site for her non-profit news organization away from their current custom-built cms, to something more flexible and better supported. It's about a 5000-ish page site with archived articles dating back about 25 years.

My first thought was that Drupal would be a great choice for this, because I've seen several examples of drupal sites of similar scale and content.

I'm trying to track down some case studies / reviews / writeups where budget is talked about. Does anyone know of any examples anywhere? I looked through the Drupal handbook and featured sites, but all I found was a bunch of (also really useful) technical discussion. Specifically, my client is looking for some context about budget. She realizes that it's going to be a big undertaking, and would really benefit from being able to put it in context with other, similar sized sites.

If anyone has seen any info like that, or could point me in the right direction, I'd really appriciate it. Thanks!

Comments

adrian’s picture

adrian commented

But http://theonion.com just switched to Drupal, as did http://evolt.org.

It all seemed to work well for them.

--
The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

I don't think anyone will be willing to discuss dollar (or Euro) figures in the open like that.

Having said that, many big sites have migrated to Drupal, as mentioned above. Add to those, Linux Journal who migrated a lot of back issues.

It depends on how complex the current CMS is.

- Do they have different authors for articles, or there is no author information?
- Do they have the concept of comments or not?
- Do they have categories/sections?

If the answer to any of the above is No, then it is simpler than if it is Yes. The more Yeses, the more complex the migration will be.

I have migrated three sites from a proprietary home grown PHP content system to Drupal. It is doable, but it all depends on the current system, and how it stores and cross references data.

--
Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

pamphile’s picture

pamphile commented

1. Since your interested in budgets, you could ask some of the owners of these sites what budgets they operated with.

2. An experienced drupal coder would also give you an estimate.

Let's hope a few stop by and leave comments in this thread.

Marcel
http://scriptmigration.com

robby1066’s picture

robby1066 commented

that was gonna be my next step, trying to contact some people at large sites that have recently done migrations. that's a good point that people probably aren't posting dollar amounts on the interent. I was just thinking I might be able to track something like that down in a "success story" post or something.

I guess I should've worded "budgets" differently. I was actually looking for anything that a head of marketing might respond to. "our migration to drupal cost us 30% less than a proprietary counterpart", etc... that type of stuff.

Thanks!

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Here are some of your cost factors.
How much is properitary CMS cost?
How much does DreamWeaver cost and how many licenses do you need and how do you make sure that the content admins get trained to maintain a consistent look and feel and can easily update content and maintain site security and w3c comlinant sites?

vs, intial cost of migration and setup, less maintainence costs for updating content through a web browser and only costs are those associiated with keeping current with the current Drupal releases during upgrades and you can pay developer X or do it in house.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide