2. Business and Strategy Migration: Smoothing the Move Presented by Mike Ryan and Moshe Weitzman

3. Mike Ryan Drupal developer since 2003 Original author of Pathauto module Primary author of Migrate module Certified to Rock score of 8 Senior Technical Consultant at Acquia

4. Moshe Weitzman Drupal developer since 2001 (d.o uid 23) 2 nd most prolific contributor in Drupal history Certified to Rock score of 11 Creator and/or maintainer of Drush, Devel, Organic Groups, and several other projects Director, Research and Development at Acquia

5. What is migration? “Migration” might mean the regular seasonal journey undertaken by many species of birds.

6. What is migration? “Migration” might mean the regular seasonal journey undertaken by many species of birds. “Migration” might mean moving your Drupal site as a whole between servers or hosting platforms.

7. What is migration? “Migration” might mean the regular seasonal journey undertaken by many species of birds. “Migration” might mean moving your web site as a whole between servers or hosting platforms. “Migration” might mean the transfer of data and content from one platform to another.

8. What are we talking about? The big picture of a data migration project The importance of communication The unknowns, and how to deal with them

9. What aren’t we talking about? The Migrate module (technically speaking)

10. Project model Typical migration project – 3 participants: – Client with content to migrate from some other CMS to Drupal – Site-building team – develops new site functionality, designs and themes the site – Migration team – develops the processes to move the content from old site to new site

13. The process Analyze – understand the legacy data Map – line up the pegs with the holes Iterate – implement, test, and refine, repeatedly Launch!

14. Analysis Design is top-down, working from the front- end

15. Analysis Design is top-down, working from the front- end The migrators need to work bottom-up, from the raw data

16. Analysis Design is top-down, working from the front- end The migrators need to work bottom-up, from the raw data There is always stuff not directly visible on the site that is important

17. Be thorough Get access to the full source data up front

18. Be thorough Get access to the full source data up front Examine it closely, table-by-table and row-by- row

19. Be thorough Get access to the full source data up front Examine it closely, table-by-table and row-by- row Act like a 3-year-old – Why?

20. Be thorough Get access to the full source data up front Examine it closely, table-by-table and row-by- row Act like a 3-year-old – Why? Why?

21. Be thorough Get access to the full source data up front Examine it closely, table-by-table and row-by- row Act like a 3-year-old – Why? Why? But why?

22. Preliminary mappings Obvious: Source data subject => Drupal title Educated guess – 98% of the status values are “2” – that probably means “published” Ambiguities – make best guess. WTH? Annotate with questions.

23. Mappings, bloody mappings Migrator Technical resource Stakeholders Site-builders

25. Iteration Implement the understood mappings Staging server – let the team see the results Refine and repeat

26. Launch A day or two before launch, run a full import into the to-be-production site. Sic QA on it.

27. Launch A day or two before launch, run a full import into the to-be-production site. Sic QA on it. At the designated time, set the old site read- only.

28. Launch A day or two before launch, run a full import into the to-be-production site. Sic QA on it. At the designated time, set the old site read- only. Run the final delta migration.

29. Launch A day or two before launch, run a full import into the to-be-production site. Sic QA on it. At the designated time, set the old site read- only. Run the final delta migration. Final QA review.

30. Launch A day or two before launch, run a full import into the to-be-production site. Sic QA on it. At the designated time, set the old site read- only. Run the final delta migration. Final QA review. Switchover

31. Celebrate!

32. Elements of Success Start the migration development, with the analysis stage, as early as possible. Get the mapping meetings done as soon as possible after that. Communicate! All parties – stakeholders, site- builders, migrators – must be responsive to each other.

33. A typical question We’ve got 1,000,000 articles and 100,000 users – how long will it take us to migrate? But, if you think about it…

34. Estimation Which is harder to migrate? – 1,000,000 articles with 3 fields each, or – 1000 blog posts with 5 fields, 500 articles with 10 fields, 3000 forum topics with 7 fields, and 800 recipes with 15 fields (including complex fields like “ingredients” and “directions”)

35. A formula Basic: Number “migrations”, plus 5 X total number of fields, times a magic factor Refined: Taxonomy migrations count less, file migrations count more. Complex fields count more.

36. For the techies BOF: Migrate in Drupal 8 – 1pm Thursday in room 210

37. What did you think? Locate this session on the DrupalCon Denver website http://denver2012.drupal.org/program Click the “Take the Survey” link. Thank You!