As many of you know, I have been the person responsible for keeping the ADF website working since 2009.  Initially, this meant that I had to maintain a lot of custom Python coding that predated me and was essentially a custom built Content Management System (CMS).  The first thing I did when I gay myself situated was to look for an open source replacement.  I tried all the big ones at the time, and some that sounded good but were difficult to get to work (looking at you Asgard CMS).  We settled on drupal as it is really set up to be for the kind of website we need.

For the past year or so I have been working to upgrade to the next major version as I knew an end of life was coming for the version we have.  This was slow because there were many things that drupal decided to change functionally (mostly for the better in the long run) that meant I had to redo what I had.  I also switched to an object oriented programming for a few things which also meant I had to make other changes.  Needless to say, the custom coding has been completed since early April.

Now, why migrate and not upgrade one may ask.  Simply the upgrade did not work.  This is in part because of the modules in use, but also because of the complexity and size of the website.  Migration was the only option (and is the only option offered to upgrade to the next version that just came out).  So, that involved many manual things to be done before the migration (creating roles, content types, text formats, etc) , installing the right modules, and setting up the makings for the migration.

2 weekends ago I got this all done, and got the content migrated over.  For the most part it worked, and the majority of the pages came across fine.  Many did not though, and many url aliases were messed up.  Much could be fixed by doing database queries, but every page needed to be checked to make sure it was working, and while we are at it. We need to check that there are no broken links, especially internal links.  What a headache.

I have had some help with this, and I greatly appreciate it.  I have found some issues myself that have been harder to fix than I expected... But it has allowed me to go back to stuff I did a year ago and apply what I have learned since to make it better, and in some cases remove it from an editable page to being in the code.  Still, there is probably about 1000-1500 pages left to examine, and many forms left to test before I am satisfied that we are ready to go live.  I know at my last check we still had about 800 broken links, hopefully they are some of the easy fixes (Amazon doesn't like how we did our links and I bet we have a couple hundred of those).

So that has been my evenings and weekends.  I have been spending almost all my time looking at my computer and getting it ready to go.  It's not as bad as when I first got the website into drupal, that was importing a couple thousand pages... This is just confirming a few settings on pages and fixing links.  Needless to say, I'll be happy in a couple weeks when this can go live... I'll take a weekend off, then start working on the next upgrade where drupal completely changed the file structure for modules.