Joomla-Drupal transfer for the Moscow newspaper

Not so long time ago we received an order for upgrading the website of a leading Moscow newspaper and fixing the following issues:

• an ancient Joomla version was impossible to be updated and new components could not be installed;
• the main website was not supported from technical side and “led its own life”;
• the website has been constantly infected by viruses, as a result of which Yandex and Google search engines blacklisted it.

It’s quite peculiar to note, but at that time we were thinking about creating a universal framework for online Media websites themselves too. We will share more details about this in other articles though and now let’s get back to the case.

We have already had a suitable prototype of website framework and decided to test it. It took us just one day to create the website description in xml language. As a result we got the following:

• news;
• articles;
• photo galleries;
• categories, menu, pages like “about the project” along with the sitemap;
• video materials (from YouTube);
• ready-to-go admin panels for editor and chief editor;
• ready-to-use set of SEO models (techniques, tools).

Afterwards, we had to transfer the existing materials to the new website. It took us about a week to do this, since there were not so many articles, photos and videos. To some it may seem quite a long period of time for transferring, however you should consider such facts, as:

• The customer used just one single spreadsheet in Joomla for all materials, whereas we had to distribute the data according to new categories in Drupal (e.g. news, articles, etc.)
• We were asked to rename/merge/delete certain materials while we were transferring them;
• We encountered an interesting thing while dealing with YouTube videos in Drupal. When using an auto-fill module, Drupal required us to fill the field for link and also add a certain code into the hidden field. 

Afterall, it took us two weeks for website coding (as usual), followed by some small remarks from the customer and fine tuning.