Tancredi

I decided to attempt to migrate this weblog across from Mephisto to Drupal. This post gives a quick overview of how I managed it and what I had to do to achieve this goal.

The main reason I decided to migrate to Drupal is because nearly all of the web sites I'm producing for Whitespace Studios are Drupal based. I'm really excited about where Drupal is going and I'm happily committing myself to fully learning, contributing to and enjoying Drupal over the next few years. With this in mind, when I attempted to update my Mephisto powered blog to include a plugin to display some textlinkads and it totally crashed, I decided it was time for a change.

Moving the data across and setting up Drupal to be as close in visual appearance as Mephisto has taken me three full days. I believe I've got a very faithful version, right down to the small elements such as the layout of the links below the node teasers and the sidebar block. I had to do a lot of research and learning to get some of these functions working as I wanted and there were many blog posts that helped. That is another reason why I'm switching to Drupal, the support base is huge compared to Mephisto.

Migrating the database entries for the content and comments was very challenging, I finally managed by exporting from MySQL as a CSV, importing into Excel and editing a few columns then using Navicat to import the xls file into the Drupal DB. A major challenge was converting the time into a unix timestamp within the spreadsheet. Luckily I came across this formula which worked perfectly.

One thing I've noticed since changing over systems is that I've taken quite a large hit in terms of page views. I'm not getting nearly the same amount of activity on the site. I'm not sure what its down to, obviously there will be a view links that don't work anymore as I've changed the category views and there isn't a monthly archive view anymore. The pages are indexed by Google, unfortunately they got indexed while there was an issue with a module so they aren't showing the correct information. Damn.

I still had to do a lot of manual cleaning of content and shuffling things around, but I think I have a very accurate and faithful conversion which I feel I can now build on easily whenever I want.

I'm not knocking Mephisto, its a great blogging tool which does what its designed to do perfectly. But it isn't the easiest to update unless you know what you are doing with Ruby, Rails and Liquid templates.