Migrating to Drupal

Included are hints and scripts from members of the Drupal community for migrating to Drupal from other weblog and bulletin board applications. Migrating from other platforms often requires some knowledge of php and SQL.

Yes, it is possible to transfer content and members from other applications, such as phpBB and Word Press. But is it easy? Probably not, just as transferring such data between almost any 2 content management systems (CMSs) would not be easy.

Each such application or CMS has its own database schema, i.e. arrangement of data into various tables and indexes. Figuring out which data from one CMS's tables goes into which tables on another CMS is challenging. No doubt some people have figured it out for some pairs of systems and even created automated ways of doing it, but those are rare compared to the complete set of possibilities.

That said, it's not impossible. There may even be some help for doing so because phpBB and WordPress are fairly common. It also depends on what kind of content you are wanting to move. If it's all text, the job will be somewhat easier than if there is other kinds of media, e.g. pictures, audio and video files, etc.

Basically, you need to map all your current members into Drupal's users table. If you have different roles (e.g. read-only, author, editor/reviewer, admin), you will need to assign your users to properly set up and configured roles in Drupal. That can mostly be done through Drupal's admin interface, although if you have a large number of members/users, you may want to find a way to automate that, as well, since editing each by hand could be time consuming.

If the content were all text, it would likely map into the node and node_revisions tables, with comments in the comments table.

Finally, look in the Drupal CVS contributions repository in the /tricks subdirectory, for subdirectories named mt2drupal (code for migrating from Movable Type to Drupal), phpbb2drupal (SQL code for migrating from phpBB to Drupal) and slash2drupal (Slash 2.2 to Drupal) for SOME IDEAS. None of these is up to date with the latest releases of Drupal and the respective source systems, so they will NOT work with latest versions of any of the foregoing. However, they will get you close.

The following pages are also methods people have used to migrate to Drupal in the past. As other CMS software and Drupal evolve, you can use these as a guide to help with your own.