Migration's Missing Manual: Tips and Reflections on Migrating ornl.gov

Migrating a large site's content is a complicated and time-consuming process that is fraught with opportunities for confusion, frustration, and setbacks. Trust us. We've been there.

Tutorial videos, blog posts, and documentation can give you enough to get started, but we had no idea what was to come after we were given the task of migrating Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Drupal 7 site containing 30,000 nodes, 1700 users, 800 taxonomy terms and 45 content types into a brand-new-from-the-ground-up Drupal 8 site with only 10 content types.

This session will describe:

• what we learned from the many mistakes we made along the way
• what needs to be decided before a single line of code is written
• the migration ETL workflow and what happens in the transform (T) step
• what process plugins are
• how to determine "what a certain process plugin actually does" versus "what you want it to do"
• what custom process plugins are, why you should not be afraid of them, and examples of how simple but very helpful they can be
• tips, tricks, and secrets for faster testing and debugging

Attendees with a beginner level understanding of migrations can expect to gain a more complete understanding of the migration process including:

• how to prepare for a migration
• the development and process steps involved
• proof that even though the migration definitions can look messy, it's not hard to understand what's happening and you can do this too!

Attendees with an intermediate level understanding of migrations can expect to see:

• examples of complicated migration definitions containing multistep pipelines and pseudovariables
• tips on handling inconsistent source data
• where to find helpful process plugins
• examples of custom process plugins and tips on when to use them
• proof that you can handle a large site migration, because if we can do it then you can too!