Over the weekend I have migrated the StressFree website across to the Drupal content management system. The move was spurred on by the shortcomings I kept finding in Joomla, the desire to be able to tag content and the knowledge that the next upgrade to Joomla 1.5 would require almost starting from scratch.
I have tried my best to maintain all the legacy links so hopefully the old Joomla and static file links should resolve okay. Overall it went really smoothly, Drupal is a little bit more difficult to get your head around compared to Joomla but now that I've made the switch I am very glad. There has been limited loss of functionality in the switch but a tonne of new features are now available:
- Firstly I can now tag content and there are tag clouds available. This should make finding content a lot easier though in the future I wouldn't mind finding a 'related tags' type module for Drupal.
- Also it looks like Drupal's content search engine actually works (compared to Joomla/Mambo's effort).
- On the administration side I now have an xmlrpc interface for writing content which will mean I can finally give Ecto some real use instead of always working through a web browser for publishing content.
- The new comment engine looks a lot better than the Joomla version as it supports html comments and replies.
- The 'printer friendly' option is far superior than Joomla's. Not only is it tidier but it also has the ability to extract hyperlinks from content and print them below the article as footnotes (which is very cool).
One piece of functionality that Joomla has over Drupal is their {mospagebreak} tag and its ability to auto-generate table of contents for long articles. It does make navigating larger documents a little less user-friendly but it is a small price to pay for the extra functionality gains.
Migration-wise it looks like content has come across okay. Some of the comments are a little messed up due to the significant formatting differences between the two systems. Over the next week I'll go through all the comments and tidy them up so there is no confusion.