Containers at port

Drupal migration

Seamlessly move content and customers

One of the reasons we love Drupal is that migrating data in and out of Drupal is unsurpassed in the CMS world. We then challenge ourselves to make it as smooth and effective as possible, like a Roger Federer serve.

‘Drupal migration’ covers a multitude of situations. You may be interested in moving from another platform to Drupal. Or upgrading to a newer version of Drupal. Or you may need to migrate data from elsewhere in your business into your Drupal system on a regular basis to make it available to customers.

At Full Fat Things, we can handle all of these and more, because Drupal excels in its ability to map and import data from almost any source and manage it as its own.

Drupal upgrades

All of our new Drupal sites are built on Drupal 10.

We can also upgrade sites from older versions of Drupal to newer ones: with the recent launch of Drupal 10, we can upgrade from Drupal 7, 8 and 9 to the newest version. 

Upgrade Drupal 6 to Drupal 7

Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 migration steps are relatively simple when compared with migrating to Drupal 9. Importantly, Drupal guarantees that your data is safe between major version upgrades and when undertaking a Drupal 6 to 7 migration, the Drupal database will be upgraded in place. 

We can migrate you from Drupal 6 to 7, but it’s not something we recommend – not least because Drupal 7 will become unsupported from November 2022. Instead, we suggest you consider migrating straight to Drupal 9, which also includes a database upgrade. Drupal 8, and now Drupal 9, incorporated a lot of popular Drupal 6 modules and extensions into the core Drupal product. This means this migration works fabulously well. You will need to build a new theme for your website, also a great time for a design refresh, as Drupal 9 includes a new way of delivering websites. But if you’re still running a Drupal 6 site, that’s a good investment anyway, as it will allow you to take advantage of modern web principles. 

Upgrade to Drupal 9

Drupal 8 marked a significant step forward when it was released. Between 7 and 8, Drupal adopted Symfony and lots of PHP code from the wider PHP community, along with popular Drupal 6 modules.  Drupal 9 continues this drive forward and enables the next layer of innovation on the web.

Now, in its current incarnation, Drupal includes:

  • better performance and scalability
  • editor simplicity, allowing you to edit and preview content in context
  • multilingual support
  • enhanced accessibility
  • headless publishing
  • vast workflow to allow entire sections of your site to be previewed

It’s great for enterprise applications and ideal as middleware. And it’s now far easier for large teams to work concurrently with Drupal 9.

Additionally, every site we migrate to Drupal 9 is built to be Drupal 10 ready so your next migration will be straightforward and painless.

Platform migration

Drupal is powerful and quick, making it an ideal choice if you’re considering upgrading your content management system (CMS) or eCommerce platform. It’s not quite magic, but it comes close.

We have migrated content and commerce platforms to Drupal for many clients over the years and we love the challenge! Whether it’s a straightforward migration or you want to enhance your offerings at the same time, we can work with you to make that happen.

We’ll also support you and your team in learning how to use Drupal. It’s not complicated, but we appreciate that moving to any new CMS can feel daunting. Importantly, we always consider staff as one of our ‘personas’ when we look at user experience for any new systems we build. Once you’re up and running, you’ll appreciate the difference that Drupal can make to getting the job done.

Orange

Full Fat Things got us started with Drupal and helped us to accelerate our learning experience. Having them available to steer us away from common Drupal pitfalls and to provide tried and tested advice on how to build in Drupal proved invaluable.

Neil Jennings, Head of Architecture, Orange (now EE)

Data migration

Every day we handle the migration of tens of thousands of documents into a Drupal site for just one of our customers. Overall, we migrate millions of documents each year.

You may not need that volume of data migration annually – few do – but whatever your needs, we can set it up and manage it for you quickly and cost-effectively. We’ll work with you to understand what data needs migrating and how users will interact with it, and then build the functionality and design on top.

Our role in the history of Drupal migrations

Back in 2008, some of the current Full Fat Things developers worked at The Economist on a project to migrate to Drupal. We worked closely with Cyrve, a company that no longer exists but at the time had a huge impact on Drupal’s development. The Migrate module, created and used for that Economist migration, now forms part of the Drupal core and is the tool with which Drupal upgrades from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, 8 and 9.

The Migrate module was built as a general purpose migration tool. It’s so powerful that it positions Drupal uniquely within the enterprise content management systems (CMS) space. It allows us to migrate, important and manage data in Drupal at scale and in a process-driven way that supports knowing full progress. There’s isn’t a single Full Fat Things project where the Migrate module isn’t involved, even if we aren’t upgrading from an older Drupal migration.

The Drupal.org website includes a case study on The Economist.com data migration to Drupal where you can read about our efforts and get a detailed insight. (You’ll also notice a lot of comments from Full Fat Things staff, if you know who we are!)

Since our time at The Economist, we’ve been involved in some large-scale sites that migrate, or import, large amounts of content and have huge numbers of users. These include data.gov.uk, which has mass public datasets of open data, and library sites for Wolters Kluwer and Croner-i that have millions of documents inside Drupal. Drupal implementations such as these don’t simply use the Migrate module for one-time migrations. Instead, they use Drupal Migrate to import content every day.