Theoretically, I always knew, that it's better to use the famous CMS then some doubtful self-written platform... But I haven't supposed that there nerds who try to present an average CMS as their own work, deforming the source...A fairy tale about shifting your site to the Drupal management system

Working site analysis

At this stage you have to find out the disadvantages of the site and the ways of their elimination.  

It may occur that there is no sense in shifting to the other engine, but it is easier to rework the old one. You should also pay attention to the website traffic, the sources of users and the presence of working links. If there are many – you should think over the ways of saving the addresses (it's better not only to make a redirect, but also to leave the old URLs). Define the technical disadvantages: page layout, working speed, the presence of meta tags and so on.

Defining the solutions

So you decided that the old engine does not fulfill the project's tasks and it should be changed. I won't explain why I have chosen the Drupal, there are plenty of holy-wars on this topic. Under “solutions” I mean the set of used modules. I recommend to use the modules that have good support and high statistics, are stable, and most important – correspond to the current aims of the project (or maybe even foresee the future aims).

Before the start

Look back once again and make sure that you've made everything correctly. Everything's ok? Then we continue.

Before the start, make a sketch of the micro-tasks, steps on the way to the finish. From this point starts the development of a new site, taking into account the disadvantages of previous one and, as the Drupal was chosen, reserve for future.

Implementation

This is a topic for a different post, because it describes the actual development. As the post is about Drupal and is useful for new ones, I give a link to a very good guide: http://drupal.ru/quickstart

Example:

I wrote this article not by chance, cause I had an experience in such work. Recently, I got a site that should have been administered, filled and promoted. The developer made it on Wordpress and tried to delete all the reminders of the used CMS. As a result there were some files left with scripts and formating, and the pages were created manually (the site was small – about 15 pages at that moment). 

So I decided to kill that creature and make a promising, strategically right platform.

Comparison in short (before and after):

• URLs are created manually – human readable URLs are created automatically;

• no meta-tags – everything is on place: headings, descriptions, key words;

• the logo is unclickable – the logo and company name lead to the main page;

• minor errors in layout – the unreadable fonts are corrected;

• not customized for 1024х768 resolution – resolutions 1024х768 and over are supported;

• table layout – block layout;

• (new) an additional menu is added (a line at the top and a block at the bottom) for better convenience, cross-linking;

• (new) breadcrumbs are added.

In case someone is interested, the modules used:

• Text editing: CKeditor+IMCE; 

• Photo gallery creation: CCK+ImageField+ImageCach+ThickBox; 

• Site navigation: DHTML menu, Breadcrumbs menu; 

• Material categorization: Taxonomy, Tagadelic; 

• Search engine optimization: Nodewords, Page title, Pathauto, Global Redirect. 

I don't see the point in describing the adjustment and step-by-step guidance – these procedures are unique for every site.