(this page is a work in progress)
I was first contacted in early November 2018 about this project. The Plant City Observer was branching off from their media company to be more in-house and independent and they needed their website redesigned and migrated over with a hard deadline of January 3rd, 2019. It was first suggested to me by their media company to stick with Drupal but I convinced PCO that WordPress was the right choice and that I could make it work. The launch was a success and the whole editorial team loves the new backend much more than what they were using previously.
Easily the toughest and most interesting part of this project programmatically was handling the migration. Their media company created an API for the Drupal website that output each post as a .json file. I did the heavy lifting of the migration with a custom-built Hackintosh (i7-8700, 32GB Ram, and SSD) on a local install of WordPress that was later deployed. A custom-developed PHP migration script first pinged their API and saved a copy of the .json files. Then it went through each .json file, parsed through the data for the various images (some were in posts, the main featured image, photo galleries, etc), and saved them categorically. The images were run through ImageOptim to optimize them and batches of wp_insert_attachment were run to get the images into WordPress. Lastly, all of the posts, images, and data (e.g extra meta fields, redirects, attachment IDs, etc) were ran through another script ending with wp_insert_post to put everything together.
Bullet Points:
- Other than creating the API from Drupal this project was entirely done by me.
- Worked directly with the client to come up with a proposal, plan, timeline, and costs.
- Managed the whole project and worked with multiple people at PCO and their previous media company to ensure the project stayed on track and launched on time.
- Migrated the following information from Drupal to WordPress:
- 11,487 Total Pages.
- 9,403 Articles.
- 2,022 Photo Galleries.
- 51 Videos.
- 11 Sponsored Articles.
- 66 Categories.
- 286 Tags.
- 14 Editors.
- 36,457 Images.
- 7,365 Redirects.
- 11,487 Total Pages.
- Migrate 343 “E-Editions” using Issuu’s API.
- Reduced the total size of the website from 19.77gb to 8.01gb.
- Sped the website up so it loads 3x faster and reduced the average page size by 600%.
- Switched their whole editorial team to using Gutenberg on a simplified version of WordPress custom-built for them: