On Moving Mountains: Lessons for Migrating Data and Content for your Next Drupal Project
summary
Starts migration planning on day one, inventories every source (CRM, spreadsheets, legacy DBs) and often finds surprising outliers like a forum with 100 posts and 5 users or 15–20 years of inconsistent CRM schema. Uses a mix of approaches: manual cleanups (five people cleaned thousands of pages in weeks), GatherContent for structured drafting, scripted runs with the migrate API plus many custom processors, and one long migration that required FoxPro → CSV → MySQL dumps and two months just to get consumable data.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction and agency background
- 5:16Why migrations go wrong
- 13:22Early planning and data discovery
- 23:40Content inventory and cleanup
- 32:26Design phase and field mapping
- 38:53Content strategy and training
- 40:59Scripted migrations and trade-offs
- 46:42Validation and UAT process
- 51:21Lessons learned and final tips
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