Site Conversion: Weekly Davespeak (Dave Matthews fan site)

Howdy,

It took me about two months of actual work and over a year of fretting about. I converted my custom php file-based CMS over completely to Drupal.

The conversion presented a number of important problems. I wanted to go tableless, I had tons of legacy content there was no way I was going to import, and of course getting templates correct.

Here's a link to the new version of the site.
Here's a link to view the old version.

Probably the most striking change from a development standpoint is that I decided to use nifty corners to round my divs rather than the images and line repetition on the old version. This was a really tough call and I can't say I'm totally happy with it--when you refresh you can see the lines being drawn for a brief moment. So I may have to go back to images if it annoys me enough.

I particularly enjoyed creating the taxonomy for the site, which you can view in my published news item about my reasons behind converting to Drupal. I also liked working with my page.tpl.php after some initial fraustration. Being new to developing full-fledged themes in Drupal, I didn't understand what theme_function methods were, or what the template.php file might be good for. Once I understood that, I was able to get over a lot of noob questions that really were vexing me.

For people interested in vBulletin, I only make a single call to the vB database on my content pages--a little variable request to show the number of replies in discussion related to an item of content. I considered a full integration using vbDrupal but decided against it because only a few people will need to be logged into Drupal to submit or edit content--the rest are just forum users. Anyway, I have an ongoing issue trying to call vB's global.php which I hope to sort out sometime soon.

Finally, the legacy content was a real tough call. A long time ago I thought I would import it all, but I realized eventually that would never happen. I was concerned about losing pagerank on many many pages and having to use custom aliasing so engines could still find the old stuff would be a huge pain.

So in the first item of my new categories, I created a simple node that linked to the old indexes. It isn't ideal, but It is a way for engines to find their way to a ton of content. I have considered adding a sidebar block that shows up on the new category pages containing a link to the index of old pages in the same category.

Anyway, I consider this to be a "real life" example of a mid-range sized website being converted from custom file-based to Drupal. So if anyone is thinking about doing this with their site and has any questions let me know.

rob