By motion-ex on

I'd like to read some success stories on migration to drupal, i am aparticularly interested in those who migrated from Postnuke 0.75

Please include:

reason for migration?
method: manual or script?
which tables were u able to move? users? articles/stories? topics? themes (how did the theme adapt to new environment)?
Any problems encountered with respect to search engine, loss of data etc...?

Thank you in advance

Comments

tjharman’s picture

tjharman commented

Hello there!

I am very keen on moving my personal blog (it's just my homepage, look at my profile) to Drupal.

The main reason I decided to move is because Drupal is such a simple, elegant system. Using PostNuke you need to install a new module to do almost anything "new" that's content related, with Drupal that's not the case.
Drupal is also much faster, has a much more technically minded support base and is more actively developed.

I have too many PostNuke modules that I've decided to download and use, only to find out they're no longer supported or never updated. Gawd knows how many security holes my website has!!

When I tried to migrate from PostNuke 0.750 to 0.760 it seems the theme I used (not a Xanthia or Autotheme) has been left behind, it rendered terribly. Also I encountered many bugs or things that didn't work. It seemed like it was going to be just as much effort to spend the time fixing them as it was to move to a totally new solution, so I decided Drupal for me.

I did a test migration from PostNuke 0.750 -> Drupal and it worked perfectly apart from the fact that Anonymous Comments weren't included. Because of this, I am still using my PostNuke site until I can sort that out. I've had a few offers of help from people, I'm just waiting for one of them to get back to me.

Here are the two threads I am currently watching.

For the test migration I did, I just used the SQL code listed in that first article and a bit of stuffing around with phpMyAdmin. It only took 15 minutes to get it up and going.

As you can see though, the only content those scripts bring across is the stories, the users and all non-anonymous comments. Topics and Catagories didn't seem to work for me but I didn't really test this enough before I then deleted my "demo" site.

I didn't try and do any theme porting, I will once I have actually moved to Drupal.

Problems I encountered were getting things in the right order so I still had an admin accont that worked (userID 1 is special in Drupal) and that no permissions follow over. In fact I had to install another permissions module then go back and retag my private stories, Drupal doesn't have by default a way to mark individual nodes with different access rights, you need a seperate 3rd party module.

Another thing that was stopping me was no Gallery random block, but now that the new, updated Gallery module has been released that works with G2, that problem has gone away.

Hope this is of some help to you, I suggesting watching those two threads I linked above for more information.

Give a month or two and I hope that there's a actual "easy-to-use" migration script for people.

Cheers,
Tim

gtoddv’s picture

gtoddv commented

What two threads?

greygoo’s picture

greygoo commented

I assume you haven't used the PageSetter module (check out http://elfisk.dk and http://pagesetter.org) in PostNuke? It completely eliminates the "need to install a new module to do almost anything "new" that's content related". In fact, PageSetter alone makes PostNuke one of the most powerful CMS right now. PostNuke's Xanthia theme engine (smarty-based) makes it even more powerful and easy for non-programmers. There are people that use PostNuke with only the PageSetter module to replace all other modules. The closest thing to PageSetter that Drupal has seems to be flexinode which is not quite there yet.

I am, however, considering using Drupal for a project that requires features that Drupal has but PostNuke doesn't. These include:

taxonomy system
social software oriented modules
easier multi-site install

But for non-programmers (who know html and css), PostNuke still has the advantage in terms of creating custom content with a powerful yet easy and elegant ability to change every aspect of your site/content's looks. PostNuke fails in the lack of support for a sophisticated category system like Drupal's.

tjharman’s picture

tjharman commented

I didn't mean to imply that PostNuke is not powerful!
I have tested PageSetter and I agree that it is a very powerful module and the two major theme systems are both excellent as well.

There's heaps of reasons to keep using my PostNuke install, my biggest is the theme I currently have. This is because the theme does not play nicely with PN0.76x
A lot of the modules I'm using are no longer supported (Subjects, Journal, Gallery Random Block, Archives)

Drupal has the functionality of Subjects, Archives and Journal built in. It also has a more up-to-date Gallery Block.

No matter what I do, I'm going to have to spend quite some time migrating data, so instead of migrating stuff to new modules in PostNuke that might again in 6 months become unsupported, I've decided to move to Drupal in the hope that the core doesn't become unsupported :)

PostNuke is an excellent CMS and has served me VERY well. As it will continue to do for many others well into the future. For me it's just time for a change.

Tim