Migrating Content to Drupal

Migration is not just for the birds anymore.  We are happy to announce this past month we completed one of our biggest web content migrations ever.  The entire Horton Group team came together perfectly on this project, throwing everything in to meet the launch deadline.  A picture perfect of representation of collaboration, team work and web know-how coming together in one fantastic project. 

A Huge Content Migration to Drupal

The General Board of Higher Education and Ministry (GBHEM), part of The United Methodist Churchs online global ministry effort, came to us looking for a more effective way to manage all of their online content.  Our suggestion was to move everything off their proprietary content management system to Drupal, our favorite open-source CMS.  As soon as GBHEM gave us the green light and we cracked the whip on this massive content migration wagon.

This was a huge move that encompassed more than 1,300 articles and content types, across 330 web pages.  Part of the migration also included moving over their old theme as a way to retain the overall functionality and appearance of the website.  While transferring the theme over to Drupal we also hooked them up with a few customized Horton Group touches, such as improvements to menu navigation, slight theme updates and panels for unique content types.

[[{“type”:”media”,”view_mode”:”media_original”,”fid”:”757″,”link_text”:null,”attributes”:{“height”:”336″,”width”:”400″,”style”:”float: right;”,”class”:”media-image media-image-right media-element file-media-original”}}]]

So the new move would not be a shock to regular visitors and to guarantee a fluid transition, we created a database of links for every page, mapping out old URLs to a completely new URL structure.  Every that may have been bookmarked by past visitors will now automatically redirect to the new set of clean URLs.

The new GBHEM website launched earlier this month and looks stunning if we do not say so ourselves.  However, the real power of the new website lies behind its façade.  They are now onboard with the one of the most innovative open source content management systems, making it even easier for them to share their message and offer the best in church-related higher education information on a global scale.

This was a vast undertaking on a short turn-around and each department here at Horton Group played an important role. Every team member put in a lot of hours on this project and The General Board of Higher Education and Ministry was thoroughly impressed with the end result.

Big props go out to the entire Horton Group team: project managers, developers, designers, content specialists and SEO strategist.