This is the first part of a story on how we tried to migrate from Drupal 6.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with drupal, but our version 6 installation was getting a bit dusty and had way more features that we needed. We wanted to move to something simpler, cheaper, faster, more scalable, newer, easier ….
The goal was to live without a server, in the cloud and getting free scalability promised. We’re not, and still are not, getting hit very hard and the ocasional spike was no real issue on our Drupal setup or our server. But it was time for some change.
VosaoCMS
A Java blogging engine in the cloud? That seemed perfect. As most of us here are to some extend Java programmers, it almost felt like being at home. With some prior App Engine experience the installation was fairly simple. Migrating the data seemed not too complex. Unfortunatelly the performance was rather disappointing. The perfomance settings were at minimum as the intention was to stay in the free tier. With the said setting the resource consuption was at roughly 50%. There is a blog entry discussing a drastic performance decrease sind Google changed the pricing model. Increasing the time between cron runs and using the latest version was said to help but did not noticeably increase performance. Neither did increasing scaling up.
Time to move on.
Blogger
Blogger was the next choice in the list. It seemed solid, fast and finally had multi-author capability. There was also an api for data migration. Migratting the articles was fairly trivial, but there was a limit on the amount of imports per day, at least that is what it seemed. The drawbacks came with the migration of the comments. Comments could only be imported with the account of the importing author, so we had to move the original author info inside the comment. Additionally the length of the comments were limited. We have a lot of comments containing code and most of them were exceeding the maximum.
Time to move on.
Drupal 7
It seemed like we were going back to the roots. But the migration from Drupal 6 to 7 seemed too troublesome. Basically all due to the database migration with little to no hints on how to proceed. This task seemed to be too time consuming to approach.
Taking a break
Well, frustration kicked in and it was time to give the migration project a break. As you can see, we ended up with a wordpress installation. How we got there and how it is set up will be another blog entry.
Nico Heid
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