The way home: content migration done

Good news: the whole content of the original Edgeryders website, back when we were still a Council of Europe project, has now been migrated to this site. By this I mean both the WordPress blog and the whole array of Mission Briefs and Mission Reports, each with its comments. That’s a lot of content: between the imported stuff and the 2013 content generated directly on the new website, at the time of writing this we are running at over one thousand nodes (“nodes” are the Drupal unit of content) with over five thousand comments. Registered and confirmed (not spambots) users are just below one thousand five hundred. This makes our new home on the web complete – less the perpetual beta condition.

Many of the most active edgeryders had an account at the Council of Europe website, and also created a new one here. If you are in this position, please be aware:

  • if you used the same email address for the old and new website, your accounts have been automatically merged into one. You can keep using your account as normal, the only difference is that your old content has come back and is already associated with your new account.
  • if you used different email addresses for the old and new website, we can't perform account merge via script. We can still do it manually; just let us know. Thanks to [Hkjovin] for pointing out the problem to us.

With this much content, looking for something in particular has become somewhat harder. What I find most effective is the search form on top right. The next step would be to reorganize the Edgeryders Episode 1 content into a tree structure that makes it simpler to navigate it, just like in the original website. If you would like to help with this, join our dev group and we’ll get in touch.

Let’s give a round of applause to our very own [Matthias] for performing this. For the technically minded, he had to write a PHP script; consistently with the Edgeryders sharing ethics, this script is free and open source, and available on our github for anyone that would like to reuse it.

Advanced search?

Just wondering: is there a simple way to have advanced search on Drupal 7? With this much content, tree structures are not an ideal way of finding things!

Filters

The existing search provides a set of combinable filters by topic, content type, author and date. Not too bad in my view. I don’t know if a Drupal 6 style advanced search is easily available. Would have to look for it …

Another user example

oh what would our lives be without you Matthias… <sigh>  Many thanks! :)

Also [joel.obrecht] has pointed out to me that his account is not associated with older content. Perhaps you want it done manually Joel?

Tech hint

For those who registered their new accoun with both a different username and e-mail address, I could not do the matching automatically. There’s an admin function though which can be used to merge the old content into their new account. Those affected who want a user merge done can tell me (for example via my contact form). Don’t forget to mention your username or e-mail address of the old account.