Thy Kingdom Come had a new Drupal website, and everything on the old proprietary site needed to move over: pages, stories, resources and videos, in English and six other languages.
The catch was that nobody had a complete picture of what was actually on the old site. Much of the content was hard to find and not indexed or searchable on the back end, and a move this size can’t be done reliably if you don’t know what you’re moving.
Start with what exists
Initially worked from a large data dump, then filled the gaps going throge the old site “line-by-line” manual downloading content so nothing was missed. I organised the content into folders and made a plain-text copy of every item in every language. Each file also listed the images and PDFs it depended on, so nothing had to be hunted for at upload time.
Prepping the move
I held off starting the move until the new site had been thoroughly tested. Spending a month moving content onto a build that might still need changes would have meant doing some work twice. The number of times each item had to be edited was kept low to make the move as cost effective as possible.
Keep track of everything
As each item went onto the new site, I logged it in one large spreadsheet covering every translation. I recorded any errors, which were either fixed on the spot or reported back to the developers then tracked and marked as fixed later. At any moment in time, I could pinpoint what had moved, what hadn’t, and what needed attention.
The result
Over about a month, I moved around 1,500 items: the main pages, stories, resources and video resources in English, around 300 translated pages in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Swahili, and 870 translated snippets, form items and buttons. I also created 130 new pages that had never been translated before, using a translation tool. Also I got to subtitle the Pope!
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