At Oregon State University our Drupal strategy had been so successful that we had over a thousand Drupal 6 sites. We realized that managing this many sites was not only an administrative burden, but it also prevented sites from sharing data effectively and presenting a clear navigation between units. We resolved to reduce the number of sites in Drupal 7 and to build large sites for each college and administrative group, and migrate the old Drupal 6 sites into them. This session will present a detailed look at how we approached the problem, some of the technologies we employed, the challenges we encountered, and the overall success of the project. We will focus on the project we did for our second largest college, consolidating their 30+ Drupal 6 sites into one Drupal 7 site.

Co-presenters: Sher Fenn, Ricky Middaugh, Paul Lieberman

Outline:

Paul: Introduction and overview. Reference to the plan I presented last year at DrupalCon Portland. Reasoning behind some of our decisions and choice of technologies.

Sher: In-depth look at our Organic Group configuration including group content types, use of Books, Contexts, etc. This should be the longest part of the presentation. It will also cover how we used Views with contextual filters to eliminate the need for hundreds of individual blocks people had created in the past.

Paul: Brief look at some of the custom code we added to make it work, and to provide contextual group information to our theme and other modules.

Ricky: Overview of OSU Profiles, it’s design and implementation, including use of Profile2 and OG integration. OSU Profiles is a set of modules we developed to manage Faculty, Student, and Staff profiles, and to provide dynamic directory lists using Views rather than the old hard coded HTML tables people had used for years.

Paul: Overview of the site migration process. Including custom content migration, groups assignment, and cleanup. We used the Migrate, and Migrate_d2d modules to accomplish this, but had to add another layer to accommodate multiple migrations into the same site.

Sher: A look at custom Views Bulk Operations for managing group membership and book assignment.

Paul: Wrap up with some of the lessons we've learned and things we may do differently on the next big site consolidation.