By sprecho on

Dear all,

I’m working for an international organization and we are planning to move our website on the Drupal 7. At the moment, we have a custom CMS that contains numerous articles, pages and large collection of pdf documents (around 60.000) stored in a database. For pdf documents we are considering development of a custom module that would retrieve data from the old database as the functionality of this part of CMS and website is quite specific, while the content of our articles and pages (without comments) needs to be migrated to the Drupal database.

As explained on this page: http://drupal.org/documentation/migrate several approaches are available for the migration process. My question is which technique to use? Is it possible just to map fields from the old database to the Drupal database? Would this work and what problems we may expect? Is it better to use the database API and import the content to the Drupal using one of the available migration modules?

I would appreciate any help/advice on the migration issues.

Thanks.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

sudev.pradhan’s picture

sudev.pradhan commented

Hi sprecho,

Migrating a large website with a large database to Drupal is always tricky. The best approach would be to use the migrate module (http://drupal.org/project/migrate) and the APIs that it provides. This will help you to migrate into Drupal "the Drupal way".

We had migrated a database from JIVE to Drupal successfully for a client some time back using the migrate module. There were some complications but it was much simpler and fool proof than any other techniques we had tried out.

Thanks,
Sudev

sprecho’s picture

sprecho commented

Hey Sudev,

Thanks for your advice. I'm currently testing the migrate module, and most probably we'll go with it.

Cheers.