By seaneffel on

Hi folks,

I need a little advice for migrating our website content to something like Drupal.

We are a non-profit community television organization in Cambridge, MA. We provide free channel time and access to production equipment so that people in our city can place their interests on television without being independently wealthy. Our access center is to television what blogs are to the internet.

I was originally looking to build into my current site some RSS in/out ability, a sitewide search feature, comment ability, etc, but addressing each one of those components indivudially might be far more work than just moving to a complete CMS. I like this Drupal package quite a bit, it seems to have active developers and problem solvers, and combines a lot of nice features.

Anyway, I am left with these questions:

1. We use Cutecast as a forum script, with 500 posts! If I move to Drupal can I then import that content or do I have to lose the last four years of posting?!

2. Less of an issue, but we use Greymatter for a news-style weblog. There are only 75 entries since the beginning of time so I could enter it all by hand... but I don't want to. Can I import this content into Drupal too?

3. Someday, like Cutecast and Greymatter, Drupal will fall to the wayside for a new type of site method/movement/revolution. When that happens, will I be in a position to migrate there or will I have locked my data away into an inaccessible format? Just an afterthought, since I am experiencing that now.

Thanks for any help you all can lend!

Sean

http://www.cctvcambridge.org
drupal test install: http://www.cctvcambridge.org/drupal

Comments

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

There is a section in the handbook with some migration scripts and ideas, so you may want to look at various strategies others have employed. I went from static HTML sites to Drupal so have not experianced your issue.

Fall by the wayside? Drupal? It is more likely to continue to adapt and accomadate the new standards and emerging formats than fall by the wayside :P. As to locked in formats. All the content is stored as text in a database. If you choose MySQL, which is an Open Source database, then that data is yours and you can extract it whenever, however you like.

-sp
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Test site...always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

seaneffel’s picture

seaneffel commented

Its a great system, no doubt about that. But the nature of technology is such that superior systems meet our needs until our needs change to the degree that it calls for a new and different system. Thats all I wanted to point out. Greymatter had a very active development community, now forums are flooded with "how do I get my greymatter data into drupal, mambo, wordpress, etc?"

I hope drupal has a good decade or so of being superior, 'cause this is the direction I'm picking!

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

Several people have written import scripts to import their content from a variety of other CMSes / forum scripts into Drupal. I don't recall any for Greymatter or cutecast.

Drupal stores its content in a MySQL database. Therefore the content can be easily retrieved. There also exist scripts that bring Drupal content to other CMSes.
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