Part Three: Making Drupal “home”

You’ve ripped the tape off all your boxes and are ready to unpack. The following are some modules and tips to follow that will help you settle into your new content management system.

• Migrate Module – provides a flexible framework for migrating content into Drupal from other sources. Out-of-the-box, support for creating core Drupal objects such as nodes, users, and comments is included. Can be used multiple times once migration workflow is defined.
• Database tools - help you make changes that can’t be done using text management tools. Since MySQL is the most popular database server in most CMS’s, use the tool phpMyAdmin.
• DRUSH – an extensible command-line interface to Drupal with 100+ commands. Required to use with the Drupal Migrate module.
• Feeds – allows data input from file sources and RSS feeds and migrates them into nodes, users, or taxonomy terms. Good for ongoing migrations.
• Joomla to Drupal – enables the import of users, sections & categories into taxonomy vocabularies and terms, and content items to nodes from a Joomla website into Drupal.
• WordPress Migrate – imports a WordPress blog into Drupal.

Last Words – Tips & Tricks & “Gotchas”

• If you need to migrate between more than one Drupal version, you need to update to each subsequent version. For example, to move from Drupal 4 to Drupal 7, you update from 4 --> 5, 5 --> 6, and finally 6 --> 7.
• Always install the Backup & Migrate module, which can be set up to automatically backup saved content, preventing you from losing valuable information.