Drupal Migration - Planning & Implementing A Move To Drupal

Moving to Drupal > Plan, Migrate, Relax!

Steve Gale CTI Digital

Friday, 30 November 12

About CTI Digital

Founded in 2003

Owned and run by Nick Rhind

35 permanent staff, mainly development staff

Drupal a core offering since 2004

Strong Agency relationship


About Steve

Solutions Architect & Director at CTI Digital

@cybermag linkedin.com/in/steviegale

Former developer

Background in bespoke solutions

Worked with Drupal for 2+ years


What we’ll talk about

Moving to Drupal

Migration

Architecture

Risks

Examples

6 Top Tips


Moving to Drupal:Why do it?


Moving to Drupal: Why

Well supported

Good Track record

Extensible API

Scalable

Vibrant Community

Its free


Moving to Drupal: Why

Great User Management

Wide array of available modules

Higher traffic

Outgrown current platform

Need more extensive features


Moving to Drupal: Before

Review your current site

Plan your new structure

Is there a migration path already?

What do you ‘REALLY’ need to take with you


Moving to Drupal: MigrationPlanning ahead


Migration: Planning

Identify the roles

Who is responsible for each task

Review, Delete, Archive, Move

Identify the risks

Loss of data / business

SEO Impact


Migration: Planning

Agree what can / can’t move

KISS


Migration: Planning

Cleaning your data: Who are the culprits?

Inline markup

Embedded links

Embedded server-side code


Migration: Planning

Trimming your data

What are you taking across

What are you leaving behind

What are the effects

Prune your content. What is really necessary?

Content Freeze


Migration: Planning

Think about your structure

Where will your old data fit in

How does it map to the new site

What additional data is now needed to fill gaps


Moving to Drupal: MigrationChoosing your approach


Migration: Approach

“It’s just an excel file”


Migration: Approach

Is there an existing path?

Drupal offers migrations from:

Joomla (J to D)

Wordpress (WP Migrate)

Typo3 (typo3_migrate)


Migration: Approach

Taking the scripted approach

Spend time understanding your data

No ‘catch all’ solution

What will the script do


Migration: Approach

Error checking

Human Eye AND Script

Spot check a selection of records before & after

Row count

Built in features: dblog, syslog (formerly: Watchdog)

audit trail, debug, error log


Migration: Approach

What does Drupal offer to help?

Queue API

Batch API


Moving to Drupal: MigrationConsider the aftermath


Migration: Aftermath

New content mixed with old

Change in structure

New URL’s

How will this affect the site?


Migration: SEO Impact

Poor migration can seriously harm your health / health of your client.....



Econsultancy 2008/9 Pre Migration traffic was peaking at 4/5k per day

Post Migration traffic dipped significantly (see above)

Loss of rankings



Loss of indexed pages

404 errors

Old site still showing in Google

Loss of Pagerank

Months & months & months to recover



Communication (SEO Agency, Devs, Client) all round the same table.

Know your site & understand what’s getting migrated & what isn’t.. Data almost never looks the same after migration

Remember it’s not just the text on the page you have to worry about (site architecture, URLS, images, meta data, 301’s & links etc.)



SEO Migration Stages

Discovery & Data collection

Variables (what’s changing)

Metrics (analytics, data, links, rankings)

credit: @YoYoSE




Planning & Implementation

Content, Keywords, IA

URL’s, Redirects

credit: @YoYoSE




Launch & Clean up

Go-live gotcha’s

Links

credit: @YoYoSE



SEO Research & Guidance

Search Engine Journal - http://goo.gl/JpBHt

SEOMoz - http://goo.gl/xz6FQ

SEO Gadget - http://goo.gl/RHC3u

Econsultancy Story - http://goo.gl/PBRWg


http://goo.gl/JpBHt

http://goo.gl/JpBHt

http://goo.gl/xz6FQ

http://goo.gl/xz6FQ

http://goo.gl/RHC3u

http://goo.gl/RHC3u

http://goo.gl/PBRWg

http://goo.gl/PBRWg

Moving to Drupal: PlatformChoosing the right architecture


Architecture: History

Look at SEO reports:

traffic stats

page impressions

expected / projected volumes


Architecture: On the menu

Site content

text & graphics

Multimedia

Downloads

Streaming

Static / Dynamic


Architecture: What if......

What happens if it goes down - impact?

Failover

Redundancy

Traffic spikes

Back ups


Architecture: Serve it well

Need more than just a LAMP stack

Use Nginx (ngix.org)

Use Varnish (www.varnish-cache.org)

Don’t skimp on provisions

Memory

Bandwidth


Moving to Drupal: RiskRisk Management


Risks: Common issues

Underestimation

Data volume, rework

Time needed

Cost incurred

Too optimistic


Risks: Common issues

No ‘catch all solution’

New content added during the migration process

Duplicate content

SEO Impact


Risks: Some ideas

Plan your migration strategy

Content Freeze if possible

Trial run


Moving to Drupal:Some examples


Example: NHS PCCwww.pcc-cic.org.uk/

Existing site

Large volume of articles

Mixed sources

XML data

Mysql db


http://www.pcc-cic.org.uk

http://www.pcc-cic.org.uk

Example: NHS PCC

How did it go? - Good!

Good data

Planned & mapped

Able to provide data dump in specified structure

Data remained constant during migration


Example: PCG

www.pcg.org.uk/cms/index.php

Existing site

Large volume of articles

Lots of new functionality


http://www.pcg.org.uk/cms/index.php




Example: NHS PCC

How did it go? - Not so good!

Poor data

Content structure not fully mapped out / changing

No content freeze

Not enough planning

Data kept changing during build.


Moving to Drupal:6 Top Tips


6 Top TipsIdentify the roles and responsibilities for all: client, dev, PM, Sponsor

Plan, Plan, Plan!

Simplify as much as you can

Take a staged approach

Take the time to prepare the data

Document what you have done!


Moving to Drupal:Any further questions?


Thank You

Steve Gale

[email protected]

@cybermag


mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Technology

Drupal Migration - Planning & Implementing A Move To Drupal