Drupal as a second (or third) generation site: Migrating content into Drupal

SESSION OVERVIEW
Drupal is a great CMS for non-profits and community-based site; however, most of the non-profits we work with already have a Web site and they do not want to lose their content OR spend months migrating it themselves into Drupal. Using Drupal and available modules, we conquered the content migration and import process on a current project. In addition, we set up the site so they could continue to import new content from other internal systems.

TRACK
site building

AGENDA
* Requirements Gathering: determining Drupal was the right tool
* Assessing the current CMS content and how to move it to Drupal
* CCK, setting up content types in Drupal to prepare for the migration
* Node_Import module and some custom modifications
* Considerations: determining the order to import into Drupal to retain node relativity fields
* Moving forward: integrating with other internal systems

GOALS
The Goal of this session is to teach attendees how to migrate content from an existing CMS into Drupal. Most of the work is actually a discovery process and Drupal configuration to match the content from the old system. The rest of the work is actually doing the imports watching it flow into Drupal! Don’t be afraid to move to a new CMS because of legacy content, especially when you know its the right solution.

RESOURCES
Familiarity with CCK content types and fields through the Drupal admin.