I have a huge site I have developed over the last 8 months. It's www.militarychallengecoin.net . I has virtuemart with 600 products, phpBB2 (with 14 mods) as my forum, and obviously joomla with many add-ons. This is my bread and butter and I am also trying to build a seamless community that can be huge. I love all the options I have with Joomla, but I think curiousity has the better side of me with Drupal. How big of a project is migrating this to Drupal? Is it possible the migration will not only make the site better but be able to have basically the same features? I am not a programmer, just know some stuff. I just don't know where to start. Is this a feasible thing to do? I would love to hear opinions.

Adam

Comments

geraldferguson’s picture

I recently did this with a number of Joomla and even old school Mambo sites. It was a royal pain, but well worth it for what I was trying to accomplish. I just couldn't deal with the horrible URL rewriting support and desperately needed something more SEO friendly. Another big reason was that I really wanted something that would output clean, simple, semantic, tableless code(again for SEO reasons).

That said, If you have that many products in VirtueMart, it's going to be a pain transferring them over. I suppose you could do it with a DB script, but I gotta tell you, I haven't been that impressed with Drupal's ecommerce system. It is nice and SEO friendly, but is pretty basic on the backend. That said, I like it's simplicity ont he front-end, there's not 12 steps to do a simple checkout, so your users will appreciate the streamlined process. We currently run PayPal Payments Pro as our gateway on Drupal, and it works well. If you are looking for a more robust cart system, you may want to delay the switch until the Ubercart project is a bit further along.

I'd suggest you get a Drupal instance up and running and manually cut/paste a bit of your content and products just to do a test run.

One module I found extremely helpful is the Category Module, which gives you a little bit of the same functionality as the Sections/Categories paradigm in Joomla.

After a look at your site, I'd say that it can be done, but that it would be a really time-intensive process, and that you'd need to really look at your reasons for switching. If it's simple curiosity, you may be better off delaying a switch until you've found things in Joomla that you just can't live with and that are costing you money. Otherwise, it may be better to start from scratch with a different project if you really want to go the Drupal route.

Jerry Ferguson
cheapsitehost.com

adamx8’s picture

I want to improve my seo on the site, and also get something more integrated and community friendly. I want to turn this into a huge military site. I am debating whether or not just wait till they finish with joomla 1.5 and stay that route. I am currently working on another project that I am doing drupal 5.1 with the see the difference first hand. Thanks for your awesome reply!

Adam

geraldferguson’s picture

I don't think there's a better CMS than Drupal out there for large community-based sites. Drupal 5.1 scales particularly well, especially when caching is turned on, and it's my opinion that the profile module in Drupal is a dream to work with compared to the rather kludgey Community Builder component in Joomla.

I too wanted to wait for the 1.5 release, but it seems that it just kept getting pushed further and further out, and to top it off, they had no plans to take the tables out of the code generated by the core content component. I know I could've hacked it, but I just didn't see enough seo-friendly changes to the core on the roadmap, and if 1.5 was long in coming, I can imagine it's going to take forever to get to a 2.0 release, and who knows if they'll even include more SEO features in that release. It just doesn't seem to be a priority for them. But it was a priority for me, hence the switch.

Jerry Ferguson
cheapsitehost.com

tobias’s picture

Hi Jerry,

Do you have a migration script/recipe floating around that you can share? I've added this comment to the "migrating from joomla" handbook page:

http://drupal.org/node/101718

Would be most grateful for any insights.

Cheers,

Tobias

(ps - jiminy crickets this forum is slow right - upward of 20-30 seconds for pages to load up!)

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