Drupal 8 is coming soon (well, when it’s ready ;) Drupal 7 is mature and has some years in it left. But, there are plenty of Drupal 6 and, gasp, Drupal 5 (and maybe even Drupal 4) sites out in the wild.

In Drupal 7 and earlier, you could use the “upgrade” path for moving a site from an older (major) version of Drupal to a new version… like Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 or Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. Not that this was necessarily simple to do though. When skipping versions (e.g. Drupal 5 to 7), when doing a redesign, or due to other factors like a hacked codebase, the “upgrade” path doesn’t make sense or isn't feasible.

Enter the migrate module

The migrate module provides a framework for migrating any site into Drupal and the migrate_d2d module makes this even easier for migrating from Drupal site to Drupal site. These modules provide base classes and helper functionality for mapping between entities, maintaining relationships between data, testing migrations in small batches, rolling back failed migrations, and more.

This session will cover

• Planning for a migration including entity mapping
• High-level overview of migrate architecture
• Dependencies and order of execution
• Handling managed files
• Consolidating content types and migrating nodes to other entities
• Custom code in preImport, postImport, prepare, prepareRow, and complete functions
• Using drush for testing and real migrations

About the speaker

Kristen has been working with Drupal since 2004 as a developer and architect, specializing in multilingual, migrations, and SEO. She has presented at DrupalCon Portland, several BADCamps, several Stanford camps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Checkout her drupal.org page for a partial list of presentations and check out more info at http://www.hook42.com/team/kristen-pol.