American Library Association: Automating our Migration to Drupal

Go behind the scenes of ALA's migration of 85,000 nodes to Drupal 7 from a proprietary CMS. ALA is adopting Drupal for www.ala.org and dozens of division and unit sub-sites.

You'll get to see how to:

• Automate the content migration from a proprietary CMS into Drupal
• Manage permissions, blocks, menus and taxonomy for a complex organization
• Give numerous sub-sites their own branding and visual identity
• Implement automated testing and high-performance, scalable Drupal
• Manage the political process, develop representative stakeholder groups and achieve consensus in an organization with many highly autonomous units

ALA is conducting a "rolling migration" to bring each sub-site into Drupal when each organizational unit is prepared. This staged process includes content clean-up, training for content editors, and careful testing and deployment.

OJC Technologies is the Drupal development team scripting the migration and building ALA's enterprise Drupal platform. The platform includes Aegir, drush make, Selenium RC and other best practice tools to manage the codebase and test suite. The high-performance scalability toolset includes Varnish, memcache and other components from the Pantheon performance platform.

This "behind the scenes" presentation will show you the enterprise-size ALA migration in progress. This is your chance to ask questions of the ALA and OJC team to help prepare for your enterprise migration to Drupal.

Presenters: Brandon Bowersox (brandonojc), Lori Patterson (OJC), Louise Gruenberg (ALA)