John began his career developing e-learning and expert systems before moving into business application and web development. He co-founded Sereno with Rod fifteen years ago. John concentrates on developing digital strategies with Sereno's charity partners and leads on design.
In a previous post, I covered some useful (and less well known) modules to help you with importing content into your new Drupal 8 or Drupal 9 website. In this post, I want to cover moving content the opposite way - from Drupal into WordPress. I also touch on more generic content importing from other content management systems.
While the Drupal core's Migrate functionality is often the go-to starting point for imports and is well covered, I'm focusing in this article on some of the other approaches and modules that might help your migrations.
Many organisations, especially those in the charity sector who may feel their values align with those of the open source community, will most likely run internal or desktop systems based on closed source software from the established vendors like Microsoft. Given the skillset of internal IT teams and the massive market dominance of these solutions, this is not surprising. So far, open source solutions based on Linux have struggled to find anything more than a foothold in this area.
Websites are always evolving. We build new websites and software tools and are constantly improving existing ones in response to changing needs and new opportunities. How are Covid lockdown restrictions affecting our work?
Option 1 - stay with the technology platform you have and rebuild.
This option is definitely the easiest provided you are happy with your current digital partners and hosting and support service. If your admin experience is fine and your support agency are helpful and responsive, your best option will be to rethink your audience, your priorities and goals and redesign your site. You’ll have no need to retrain and get used to a new CMS plus you can keep your data where it is which is a huge attraction.
If you are seeking a new digital partner for your charity's website, or are looking to improve the way your site is hosted and supported, the following guidance should help.
While large charities may have the digital expertise or budget to deploy effective donation systems, this is not generally the case for small to medium sized charities. This is because the donation landscape is confusing, costs variable and the levels of expertise and technical knowledge required for comprehensive solutions are very often beyond the reach of small busy charities lacking deep pockets.
It's often the case that charities first use recommendations and Google to engage a digital partner to help with a site rebuild. However, some of the most successful redesign projects start with a period of internal negotiation and planning. Apart from normal bugeting and timescale setting, charities should take the time to review their site anlytics and think through their goals. Where is their current site failing? Where is site traffic coming from? Which search terms or social media channles are visitors using to find content? What is the best perofrming content?
Two years ago, at the Drupal conference in 2017, Dries Buytaert, Drupal’s founder, discussed the ways in which Drupal could leverage its sophistication and power and not compete with small website building platforms that take care of all the design and hosting for you - eg Wix, Squarespace. Drupal has always excelled at flexibility, security, scalability and providing industrial strength websites.
Drupal site owners have a wealth of choices when it comes to maximising visibility on search engines. You have to keep your content relevant and up-to-date but by thinking carefully about the tools on offer, you can make the most of your content and see improvements in your rankings.
When you publish content, make sure you give your content a title that really makes it clear what your content contains. Don’t reuse titles either as this won’t help your content when it’s being indexed.
Sereno Charity Websites & Intranets
Sereno builds bespoke websites & intranets for charities in Drupal & WordPress.
