This chapter assumes that you have installed Drupal using the Standard install on either your localhost development environment or on a hosted web server. We're going to start from a core Drupal install using Drupal version 7.15, the latest Drupal version at the time of this book's writing. Let's get started.
First you should load your Drupal site's status report, and confirm that your core Drupal environment is working correctly and that you have the correct PHP configuration for your migration. In our local development version of Drupal 7.15, we can confirm that the site is running on a PHP 5.3.x application environment (in this case powered by MAMP) and has a PHP memory limit set relatively high at 512 MB.
This memory limit is reasonable for a development environment, though in a production server, you'll most likely want to run a memory limit from 96M to 128M. You can tweak the memory limit using a few methods.
In an application such as MAMP Pro, you can simply tweak your php.ini file by editing the loaded PHP template via the MAMP Pro interface. You can also add the following line of code to your Drupal site's setting.php file and then flush your Drupal cache:
ini_set('memory_limit', '96M');You should also be comfortable with accessing your MySQL database for your Drupal site by using phpMyAdmin or another type of MySQL tool. MAMP or MAMP Pro also provide an easy access to the phpMyAdmin interface by using the MAMP WebStart button in the MAMP interface. We'll be looking at tables in the Drupal site database, once we start running our imports. It's recommended that we run our migration process on a staging or development server before running the same migration on a production site.