I posted a tweet about this last week and it was suggested that I put it in the forum.
I did the upgrade from Drupal to Backdrop about 7 months ago. The Backdrop site is not in use yet but will be by the fall so we are still adding content to the Drupal site. While working in Backdrop I've made numerous changes that make updating the site with the Drupal database will not work. Now I have over 50 blog posts, including photos to move into Backdrop. I've been doing this manually when I have the time. It's kind of like treading water.
It was mentioned that I could probably use Feeds to automate the process. Keep in mind that I don't have access to the code of the Drupal site. I need to ask to have modules installed and to get backups. So what would I need installed? I've wanted to ask our vendor to install Backup & Migrate in the past but I'm not completely sure they would do that but I could try. The alternative is that I keep up the cutting and pasting.
Comments
Hey keiserjb,
Yes, posting questions here in the forum ensures that any discussions/answers help others with the same or similar problems. So thank you for taking the time to do this.
To your problem now, I would say that copy/pasting can be avoided. I would also say that yes, using Feeds is good way to get content from your Drupal site to be consumed by the Backdrop site. I'd try to get your host to install Feeds for you, but if that is hard and/or takes time to happen, then you could ask them for a full export of the db and a copy of the codebase.
With Feeds installed in the Drupal site, you could set up either one, or multiple feeds, and export content as needed that way. Any content added/updated will become available in the feed(s), and you can then consume it from the Backdrop site.
With the db export + codebase option, you would set up a clone of the Drupal site on your local, and then install Feeds (+ any other module you might need, since you'd have full control over it). After that, it'd be pretty much the same as what you'd do if Feeds was installed on the actual Drupal site.
I hope that this helps.
Well, I'm not real confident on how to setup the module to make it work. I've got a new D7 site running and added a test basic page. How do I make it export?
I have not used feeds module recently, so I don't recall. I am pretty sure that there are quite a few great tutorials available for D7 feeds module (videos and/or text).
Feeds is a bit heavy to be honest. I'm actually surprised we don't have a simpler way to get this done. There's https://github.com/backdrop-contrib/node_export but it doesnt seem to be finished. I'm afraid for now you'll have to figure out Feeds.
This may not be news, but I had some success with Node Export on D7 and Feeds on Backdrop. (Couldn't get Feeds -> Feeds import to work correctly.) The way I got it working was to set Node Export to export to a .csv file (in my case, nodes of type story), which I downloaded. I set up the Backdrop Feed "node import" importer to read in a CSV and matched key columns in the CSV file to local fields using the importer editing page. (I found it easier to open the CSV file in Excel to see column headings, but use whatever works. By default, Node Export puts a header row on the export file.)
I didn't try to bring over the author (set it instead to assign to a single author), but generally it worked well. I used the 'UUID' field filled in by Node Export to be the unique 'key' for the import (matching GUID). At least one field has to be unique. Transferred some 100 stories this way, with images attached, and so far so good.
Hope this helps someone!
For the record I cut and pasted the missing blogs. This was so long ago and the experience that I've gained made me realize the difference between content and configuration. It is likely that I could have reimported the D7 database with the new content while retaining all of the configuration that I had changed.