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By tinkerpod on
The musicmanamps.com site is one of the old sites on the internet, from the 90s. It features information about the vintage Music Man guitar and bass amplifiers, which were built in the years from 1974 to 1984, were used by many famous people, from Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Blues Brothers even Elvis.
Besides downloads of manuals and schematics, the main feature of the site is a forum with thousands of entries. The forum software used at that time was the commercial discus forum from a company called discusware, which seized to exist.
To ensure a future for the site, Steve Kennedy, the owner of the site, decided to work together with Tinkerpod to migrate the site to a modern software platform. The migration of the old contents was performed within a week, using the import_html-module, with a lot of automated cleanup of the ~2000 html files.
Now a new home for the Music Man Amplifier enthusiasts has been established, using a future proof platform, responsive design and much better administration than the old site.
Why Drupal was chosen:
As the main feature of the site is the forum, pure forum software like SimpleMachinesForum and phpBB were examined. Those forum software don't provide any migration from the old discus format. As the migration of the existing content was crucial, drupal and the import module was chosen. Furthermore, the possibilities and flexibility in using a proper CMS instead of a pure forum software led to drupal.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The migration from the old discus forum was the crucial point in this project. Cleaning up the old content, tags, html-tables and html-formatting in the existing more than 2000 html-files was an important first milestone, allowing an quite clean import of the html-files into Drupal with the import_html module. Several tries were performed, and further cleanup was done directly in the drupal database (with the help of the backup_migrate module).
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Migrate was discarded for its complexity when importing simple html files. The import_html module was the perfect choice with its features, providing a simple and fast import with exatly the features needed for this job.
The Bamboo-Theme is easy to use, adaptable, responsive and clean.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Sectors:
Community
Music
Non-profit
