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chris — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 11:15:55 GMT

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Static Archive

I would suggest it would be worth generating a static archive of the Drupal site using HTTrack, this is quite simple to run from the command line on a server, an example of the output generated is the Totnes Drupal Site Archive. Ideally forms would be disabled before doing this (search and such like won't work with static HTML!), but this can also be done using CSS tricks to replace all the forms with some text, see for example how this was done for the static In Transition Movie archive, I'd be happy to sort this out.

Importing Content

I would suggest that every attempt should be made to import as much of the existing content as possible and for it to remain on the existing URLs so as to ensure that as few external links into the site as possible are broken, as Tim B-L pointed out around 18 years ago, Cool URIs don't change.

Last time the site was moved, in 2011, from a wiki which is archived here and here a fair amount of work was put into sorting out Apache redirects to ensure that most people found their way onto the right pages, but more could have been done -- there were huge numbers of 404's from people following old links for years afterwards.

So looking at one example article:

https://www.transitionnetwork.org/blogs/rob-hopkins/2016-02/chris-johnstones-burnout-tips-all-one-place

this URL should be able to be replicated in WordPress using the permalink settings, something like this:

/blogs/%author%/%year%-%monthnum%/%postname%

The images should also remain on the existing URL's if possible, even if we end up having to host a set from Drupal and in addition import the images into WordPress, the article above has one image at this URL:

https://www.transitionnetwork.org/sites/www.transitionnetwork.org/files/hotchris_3.jpg

Importing the user accounts and permissions and their relationship to content is also a consideration so that authors of content are able to edit their imported content.

If content is unable to stay on existing URLs then I'd be happy to help sorting out Apache rules to ensure that as many URLs as possible still work.

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paul — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 12:07:48 GMT

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Great advice!

A couple of related things you'll want to consider as part of the migration :

Drupal aliases (Existing aliases for node paths) https://www.transitionnetwork.org/admin/build/path

Existing 403 redirects https://www.transitionnetwork.org/admin/build/path-redirect

You'll probably also need to investigate menu and taxonomy from the perspective of preventing broken links:

https://www.transitionnetwork.org/admin/content/taxonomy/ https://www.transitionnetwork.org/admin/build/menu

Transition Technology: Ticket #904: Issues to consider in the migration from Drupal to WordPress

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Static Archive

Importing Content

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