Book Image

Migrating to Drupal 7

By : Trevor James
Book Image

Migrating to Drupal 7

By: Trevor James

Overview of this book

<p>This book will show you how to migrate your content into the Drupal content management system. You&rsquo;ll start by building a content type in Drupal to hold your migrated content. You&rsquo;ll then import your content into Drupal using the Feeds module. In order to be able to easily use them again and again, you will also learn the best methods of maintaining and packaging migration configurations.<br /><br />In "Migrating to Drupal 7" you&rsquo;ll learn how to quickly package your legacy site&rsquo;s data into a format that&rsquo;s easy to import into Drupal. You&rsquo;ll then build a content type to hold migrated data in Drupal. To save time and hassle you will learn how to import content into Drupal using the Feeds module. You&rsquo;ll then get a brief introduction to the Migrate module and its powerful features.<br /><br />With this guide you&rsquo;ll also learn how to upgrade your Drupal 6 website to Drupal 7 in short, simple steps. You&rsquo;ll also learn how to package your configuration code in Drupal using the powerful Features module.<br /><br />In "Migrating to Drupal 7" you&rsquo;ll start by collecting your current site&rsquo;s content and packaging it up into a CSV file so you can easily import it into Drupal. You&rsquo;ll then build a content type to hold your migrated data and content. <br /><br />Mastering migrations using the Feeds module will be the next invaluable tutorial before you get a closer look at the Migrate module&rsquo;s powerful features. You&rsquo;ll then upgrade your Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7 and use helper modules to help run the upgrade faster and with less hassle. This book will then take you through the process of migrating CCK-based Drupal 6 fields to Drupal 7 using the Content Migrate module. <br /><br />Using the Features module you will then package up our Feeds importer and content types into code to help you to build an easily maintainable and flexible Drupal website with.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Migrating to Drupal 7
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
5
Maintaining a Migration Path
8
Migrating Content from Earlier Drupal Versions
Index

Prepping your existing data for migration


In this book we're going to import data and content to our site using CSV files. The Feeds module easily allows us the ability to upload a CSV file and import its content into Drupal nodes. So you're going to need a CSV file to use, for the examples in this book. I'm providing a default CSV example file in the code package that comes with the book but you can also use your own CSV. You will want to follow these requirements for creating and saving your CSV file for use in the examples:

  • Make sure you save your CSV file in UTF-8 encoding.

  • Make sure you add column headers in your CSV.

  • If you are adding multiple values to a cell, confirm that you have a consistent separation character. For example use commas to separate values. Otherwise use pipes.

  • Confirm you can open your CSV file in an application such as Microsoft Excel, and also in a text editor such as TextWrangler.

  • Confirm that you have named your column header titles using a consistent naming convention; for example, make sure you are using underscores instead of blank spaces in your column header titles. If you are importing a column of data, which contains a Google Map URL for example, name the title of that column as google_map. Also it's good practice to confirm that all your column header titles are in lowercase.

We've now prepped our CSV file and we're ready to start building our Drupal content type that will hold this imported content and data.