Will Drupal work for my site?

By rwhillrunner on 17 Nov 2015 at 15:58 UTC

I have a long standing site (it's been around since 1999) and I've wanted to use a CMS for some time but I've always been hesitant due to all the custom code I have. I'm ready to make the switch but I'd like to see if Drupal is the right fit. A few of my concerns/requirements:

1) I have an SMF based forum. I'm not concerned about continuing the forum but I did tap into the SMF users to manage user accounts throughout my site. How difficult is it to port SMF users and possibly form posts to Drupal? I searched the site and seem to see conflicting information.

2) I have a custom built blogging platform that allows not just myself but any registered user to write blog posts. Could this be continued on Drupal? Of course, it would be up to me to port existing posts/comments into Drupal. How difficult would that be?

3) I have a few pages that rate very high on search engines for relevant terms and one specifically that a lot of people have bookmarked. Is it possible to keep the same URLs I have or will Drupal change my URLs? I see a mention of permalinks but I'm not sure that's what I'd be looking for.

Thanks for any help/advice you can offer.

Comments

1) Should be possible, if

nevets commented 17 November 2015 at 17:11

1) Should be possible, if there is not an existing solution, you will need to figure out the mapping of data from SMF to Drupal

2) In Drupal it is easy to allow anyone to write blog posts, but the answer will depend on if they are posting to a common block or individual blogs (in the later case there is a page with all blog posts). Porting existing posts/comments can probably be done with the migrate module but will some custom code.

3) It depends on what the urls look like, best case you can keep the same urls across the board (in part using aliases). It is possible though you may need to map existing urls to new urls in .htaccess

Thank you

rwhillrunner commented 18 November 2015 at 15:53

I'm plenty comfortable with custom code, as the large majority of my existing site is custom code I've written over many years.

Thanks for the information. it sounds like this is definitely possible.

Will Drupal work for my site?

Michael-IDA commented 18 November 2015 at 00:11

Will Drupal work for my site?

Yes.

How difficult is it to port {pages, users, content, blah, blah, blah} to Drupal

Simple if you know PHP, MySQL, and the Drupal API. The data mapping is time consuming, which is why my starting bid for migrations is $1,000.

You can use Migrate, but expect either, or both, lost data and duplicated nodes.

Is it possible to keep the same URLs I have?

Yes. As long as there is a way to determine the existing URL, you can inject the URL you desire during the data migration process.

Best,
Michael

Drupal Hosting

NIH Cancer Study: Supplemention with both vitamins and fenbendazole exhibited significant (P = 0.009) inhibition of tumor growth.

Thank you

rwhillrunner commented 18 November 2015 at 15:55

It sounds like there is definitely some possibility but everything I need is definitely possible. I'll check out Drupal and see how well it fits my needs. Look forward to hopefully moving onto a CMS as opposed to trying to code nearly everything myself as I've been doing for the past almost 17 years.