Drupal to Elgg Migration?

Another thinking-out-loud topic here… I’m re-evaluating weblogs.ucalgary.ca – what’s worked, what hasn’t, what could be done differently. It’s best to take a long, hard look at it before it really takes off. There are a bunch of users in it now, but a critical evaluation of it is pretty important before we get into the hundreds of users level… I’m also colouring evaluation in light of the PLE/EduGlu concepts being rolled around. Perhaps the need to have a communal blog hosting service on campus is less important, or unnecessary, if that function is pushed into an aggregator service where it should be, rather than in the hosting side of things.

Elgg has improved a heck of a lot in the year since I quietly rolled out weblogs.ucalgary.ca (powered by Drupal at the moment). I really like the simplicity of the Elgg interface – helped by the fact that it’s not trying to be a Swiss Army Knife, as Drupal is.

In the back of my mind, I had been hoping to keep WordPress MultiUser as the backup plan in case Drupal didn’t work out. Elgg might be a more appropriate alternative.

Also, it’s not that Drupal isn’t working out, it’s just that weblogs.ucalgary.ca doesn’t have the right feel – it’s not a personal environment, it’s a commune. That makes it harder for an individual to find their own voice in the mishmash of common spaces within it. Elgg and WPMU are better as individual spaces, with varying degrees of built-in aggregativeness (Elgg has some cool Friends features, WPMU would rely on external aggregation).

So, in assessing plans B and C, has anyone successfully migrated from Drupal to Elgg or WPMU?

Another thinking-out-loud topic here… I’m re-evaluating weblogs.ucalgary.ca – what’s worked, what hasn’t, what could be done differently. It’s best to take a long, hard look at it before it really takes off. There are a bunch of users in it now, but a critical evaluation of it is pretty important before we get into the hundreds of users level… I’m also colouring evaluation in light of the PLE/EduGlu concepts being rolled around. Perhaps the need to have a communal blog hosting service on campus is less important, or unnecessary, if that function is pushed into an aggregator service where it should be, rather than in the hosting side of things.

Elgg has improved a heck of a lot in the year since I quietly rolled out weblogs.ucalgary.ca (powered by Drupal at the moment). I really like the simplicity of the Elgg interface – helped by the fact that it’s not trying to be a Swiss Army Knife, as Drupal is.

In the back of my mind, I had been hoping to keep WordPress MultiUser as the backup plan in case Drupal didn’t work out. Elgg might be a more appropriate alternative.

Also, it’s not that Drupal isn’t working out, it’s just that weblogs.ucalgary.ca doesn’t have the right feel – it’s not a personal environment, it’s a commune. That makes it harder for an individual to find their own voice in the mishmash of common spaces within it. Elgg and WPMU are better as individual spaces, with varying degrees of built-in aggregativeness (Elgg has some cool Friends features, WPMU would rely on external aggregation).

So, in assessing plans B and C, has anyone successfully migrated from Drupal to Elgg or WPMU?

10 thoughts on “Drupal to Elgg Migration?”

  1. Hello, Darcy,

    I haven’t yet done a Drupal to Elgg migration, but I just took a look at the table structure of Elgg, and (famous last words here) it might not be that hard.

    In the migration, the ident fielg in Elgg’s “users” table corresponds to the uid in Drupal’s “users” table, and migrating the basic user data would be pretty straighforward.

    Then, the values in Drupal’s “node” table would be mapped to Elgg’s “weblog_posts” table; comments would be moved from Drupal’s “comment” table to Elgg’s “weblog_comment” table.

    Drupal’s taxonomy would be recreated on Elgg’s “tags” table —

    It looks like weblogs.ucalgary.ca is using Drupal’s Organic Groups module. The groups could be re-created within Elgg’s “groups” and “group_membership” tables.

    Obviously, there would be a whole lot of tweaking, but at first glance it seems like a manageable job — it looks like you have under 400 posts at weblogs.ucalgary.edu, which would make it even more manageable.

    RE

    Also, it’s not that Drupal isn’t working out, it’s just that weblogs.ucalgary.ca doesn’t have the right feel – it’s not a personal environment, it’s a commune.

    Zack Rosen had a post on his blog where he was advocating combining Drupal and Elgg — you are right on when you identify that Drupal is not a personal environment. Drupal and Elgg are both great projects, but they do things with a different emphasis.

  2. One quick edit:

    RE

    It looks like weblogs.ucalgary.ca is using Drupal’s Organic Groups module. The groups could be re-created within Elgg’s “groups” and “group_membership” tables.

    Depending on whether you wanted Drupal’s OG’s to become Elgg communities or access groups, you would use either Elgg’s Elgg’s “groups” and “group_membership” tables (for access groups) or Elgg’s “users” table (for communities) — either way, though, it’s just a field mapping issue.

  3. Bill, thanks for the thoughts. I hadn’t realized that Organic Groups could be replicated within Elgg. Very cool. When I get a chance I’ll try to do a conversion between databases. Makes me a bit nervous, as I’m sure there are subtlties in both systems that I’ll overlook.

    I just found some code that adds LDAP authentication to Elgg, so that will help:
    http://elgg.net/elggcoding/weblog/3049.html

    Now to figure out how to map users between the 2 systems, and migrate Drupal nodes to Elgg tables…

  5. D’Arcy, I would just push back a second that hosting services are no longer required; the thing for me that was highlighted in the NV sessions and in other discussions is that for these to really succeed, we need to get an intelligent re-mixing environment (a.k.a. ‘eduglu’) happening, but that doesn’t have to be at the sake of providing hosting services. I think it’s important not to overestimate the saviness of the user population (nor under-estimate it either) and so rather than being an either/or, I think it’s a both/and, but maybe we’re realizing that we’ve been ignoring the re-mix/aggregation side, and that this is what will ultimately offer the freedom of choice that seems important for people to have ownership and authentically engage. So I would still see this investigation into a hosting platform as important, but, as I think you say, maybe not as important as it once seemed. Cheers, Scott

  6. Scott – Right… Which is why I’m re-evaluating the weblogs hosting package to see if I can find a way to let users “find their own voices” if they decide to use it as their blog host. Drupal/Elgg/WPMU would all fit the bill for that side of things, and Eduglu/Gregarius would work from the other end of things. It’s the combination of the two approaches that would be most effective – can’t ignore one for the other.

    As much as I’d love to turf the hosting side, many users on campus will still want a provided solution (at least for now) so I kind of need to make sure a decent on-campus hosting option is available even as I evangelize about the powers of having your own personal off-site hosting.

    Eduglu etc… should be able to adapt to use whatever people are publishing, wherever they do it, so it won’t care if it’s an on- or off-campus host…

  7. D’Arcy,

    I haven’t done a migration. So I can’t help there. But I have had WPMU up and running for almost five months. I like it. I looked at ELGG before setting up WPMU and just didn’t like the feel. I did like that users could customize their theme, this is a short coming of WPMU. I guess I’m just offering to be a resource for WPMU.

    One thing that is troubling is the table structure in WPMU. Each user gets 9 tables in the DB. The developers have WordPress.com set up to run on a INNODB and a cluster, I think. But there is a fairly substantial difference between the WordPress.com code and WPMU code.

  10. D’Arcy et al – I’m struggling with a number of issues with the various Elgg installs I have (not the least of whioch is to drive community interaction) but just from an operational level:

    1. What considerations have you gone through to decide between web host or self host?
    2. What concerns do you have about personal security/confidentiality?

    I know these are things I should bring up in elgg forum, but hey, post often, post many and responses may come.

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