By tanhaa on

Hey folks,

I'm looking to convert an entertainment site from a custom CMS to drupal. The site has been inactive for over a year with no new content added, however, it accumulated a lot of content over its 9 years existence in the form of news articles, interviews, videos, images, etc. The custom CMS no longer serves the need to easily update the site on a daily basis. I'm fairly new to Drupal myself but I love the power and ease it offers despite the learning curve. However, being fairly new to the CMS, migrating a complicated site such as this one seems out of my scope. I am a fast learner and any assistance rendered will be highly appreciated. I have looked over plenty of migration tips here on the Drupal site and have installed the modules required to make the move.

tanhaa AT tanhaa DOT net

thank you!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

tanhaa’s picture

tanhaa commented

I forgot to add, please email me for more details or if you think you could share your expertise on drupal migration with me. Email address again is tanhaa AT tanhaa DOT net

Again, any assistance would be highly appreciated. The site in question is a Bollywood Entertainment site which has a HUGE amount of segregated content in it. Just in terms of number, the amount of articles type content (interviews, news, etc... ) is about 9000 ...

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

You'll want to take a look at the http://drupal.org/project/migrate and http://drupal.org/project/node_import modules.

tanhaa’s picture

tanhaa commented

Hi WorldFallz,

Thanks for the reply. I have had a look at these modules and I am trying to wrap my brain around them. Not being a php programmer, it takes a bit more time than usual to understand what I can do with these modules, that was the reason for requesting assistance and coming here to the Drupal forum.

Thank you

Amit

AdrianC-1’s picture

AdrianC-1 commented

Not so much PHP skills needed, as a bit of (relatively basic) SQL.

You're going to need to build the structure of your new site, then add a couple of documents to it. That'll allow you to see how the database stores the various fields.

Then compare that with how they're stored in your old database, map the fields across, and see which fields might need to have some changes made.

Oh, and... backups! Test, test, test and test again before you do it "for real".

tanhaa’s picture

tanhaa commented

I was reading up on Migrate documentation. Seems custom PHP scripts help or ease the migration a lot. I think nodeimport will be good as I can simply take the CSV file and put them in Drupal.

I'm going to stick to your advice and plan the structure. Use CCK to make the custom fields and then add a few documents in it to see how the database stores the various fields.

I guess I'll stick to asking my questions here as I haven't received any personal interest in rendering assistance through email yet.

Thank you for your input, its really appreciated.

SlimGrin’s picture

SlimGrin commented

I'm in the same boat. I've got a custom CMS site a friend built for me 5 years ago that I want to move into drupal.

My first step was to create custom content types with the same fields as the original site. I installed Migrate and related modules. It seems that I now need to create a cms file from my original database and upload it into the new one.. But, I don't really see how to do this.

Has anyone done this successfully? and willing to describe the steps for us?

Thanks!

tanhaa’s picture

tanhaa commented

Basically, taking it one table at a time, I think what you would have to do is export the table, SQL file or CSV file. You could do that using phpmyadmin or any other SQL client (export the whole database, use a desktop SQL client to export specific content table in CSV) and then you can use nodeimport to import it into Drupal. That should simply do the trick, though I have yet to try it as I'm still in the process of making my custom content type.

Thanks for participating in this thread in hopes to get knowledge from the Drupal gurus out there.

tanhaa’s picture

tanhaa commented

How would you guys recommend handling images.

Images are present in the current custom CMS in several sections -- Photo Galleries for one which is segregated into several different types of photo galleries

Secondly, images within the news articles--

So this is what I'm thinking:
in the CCK, add an image field (sometimes, articles have up to four images, so add four image fields) and import the images just like the rest of the data for a particular article. Where do the images get stored and get called in the page displaying it?

Any thoughts on this, please share here.