1. How to Migrate, Manage and Centralize your Web
Infrastructure with Drupal
Jim Keller
Principal, Context

2. 9-person Drupal team based just
Outside of Philadelphia
Background in Software Development
Extensive server management
& website deployment experience
http://thisiscontext.com

3. A common problem
- Different departments within an organization create, manage,
and maintain their own website
- No thought given to scalability, centralization, or ongoing
viability
- No consistency in approach

4. In the end, organizations are left with a tangled mess of different
platforms, different development techniques, and proprietary components

5. A plan
Assess
What do we have now, and who is it important to?
Migrate & Integrate
Transferring data from one platform to another, or sharing data between
systems
Manage
Keeping everything running
Maintain
Preventing the mess from happening again

6. Drupal

7. What is Drupal?
A content management system
An application development framework
A multi-site management platform

8. Who uses Drupal?

9. Who uses Drupal?

10. The Plan
Migration to Drupal

11. Assess
Before making any kind of platform decision, take an inventory of your current web properties
Start slow and break the process into manageable chunks
Collaborate with stakeholders to identify priorities
Take extra time assessing integrations / data
sharing components

12. Migrate
Drupal 7 Entities
Entities provide a single building block for all types of data stored in Drupal
Entities can be blog posts, news entries, users, taxonomy terms, comments – any piece of data
is considered an entity
Entities have fields, not unlike tables in a database
Drupal modules act on entities using the entity API. Once a piece of data has been imported
into Drupal as an entity, it can be manipulated, displayed, aggregated, or referenced by other
entities.

13. Migrate
The Feeds Module: Your friend in migration
One-off imports and periodic aggregation
of content
Create nodes, users, taxonomy terms
or simple database records from import
Import or aggregate RSS/Atom feeds
Extensible to import any other kind of content
Import or aggregate CSV files
Granular mapping of input elements to Drupal
content elements
Import or aggregate OPML files
PubSubHubbub support
Exportable configurations
Batched import for large files
...Combine with the Feeds Tamper module for custom pre-processing of incoming data

14. Migrate
You may have to write some custom code to massage your data into
place, but Drupal can make this process approachable
Learn more about feeds:
The developer's guide to feeds: https://drupal.org/node/622700
Contributed Plugin modules for feeds: https://drupal.org/node/856644

15. Integrate
Drupal provides almost limitless opportunity to integrate outside systems, but there are
Some important decisions to be made before beginning the technical aspects of integration:
1. Does the cost (both time, money, and opportunity) of performing the integration
outweigh the benefit of actually having the systems integrated?
2. Can the existing system and the new system live harmoniously, but still remain
separate, without compromising user experience or internal workflows?
3. Does the existing system provide strong integration opportunities, without the need to
rebuild a significant portion of the application’s business logic?

16. Integrate
Some help with your integration, courtesy of Drupal:
The services module – http://drupal.org/project/services
“A standardized solution of integrating external applications with Drupal. Service
callbacks may be used with multiple interfaces like REST, XMLRPC, JSON, JSON
RPC, SOAP, AMF, etc.”
Custom Drupal modules
You probably won’t come away with a successful integration without building a few of
these. Don’t be afraid to build custom where needed, but remember to search first so you
don’t reinvent the wheel.
Feeds, Again
Feeds can be your friend here as well. For integrations that don’t require realtime
communication, a custom feeds plugin running on a set interval is a practical way to
import and export data.

17. Manage
Drupal Multi-Site
Multi-site capabilities are built into Drupal core
A single Drupal core installation can drive dozens of sites
Module installations can be shared across multiple sites, creating a centralized hub for
management &updates

18. Manage
Drupal Multi-Site
Module installations can be shared across multiple sites, creating a centralized hub for
management & updates

19. Manage
Enterprise Hosting
Drupal can run on Linux or Windows, and supports a number of database engines including
mySQL and MS-SQL
Drupal has a 40-person security team
Drupal has been combat tested on high-profile, high traffic sites
Enterprise hosting platform and 24/7 support through Acquia

20. Manage
New Relic Integration
Provides traffic & bandwidth reports, server performance & resource usage data, downtime
alerts

21. Maintain
Policies and Procedures
Create standards and best practice recommendations for your organization
Having clear, written policies and procedures for change management is critical to ensuring
that
Make sure stakeholders are aware of the procedures and have adequate time to account for
them in planning

22. Maintain
Policies and Procedures
Provide a list of the approved, activated modules developers will have access to
in your multi-site environment

23. Maintain
Policies and Procedures
Provide documentation on how to properly structure sites for deployment

24. Maintain
Policies and Procedures
Provide documentation for change management

25. Other Considerations
For another time...
Adoption
Helping people understand the benefits of change
Training
Centralizing helps makes training efforts much more practical
Ongoing Support
Keeping your users happy and productive

26. Thank You