Migrating Kentico to Drupal

Question

We are going to be migrating from Kentico to Drupal soon. Can anyone share any migrations paths they have taken to migrate site structure and content to Drupal?

Would also be helpful to understand any details around the processes followed to migrate content.

Our Kentico site has about 30,000 pages.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is 90% dependent on what Drupal allows you to do from a data import standpoint. The other 10% is knowing how to get the raw content out of Kentico. My suggestion would be to take the options Drupal gives you to import content and see how you can with content in Kentico. With 30k pages, I'd assume you have some sort of structured content in Kentico. If you don't, you'll have to use some sort of scraping tool to get your content directly off the site.

So assuming you are using structured content, Kentico's primary tree and page definition tables can be found by running this query:

select *
from view_cms_tree_joined
order by NodeLevel, NodeOrder, NodeName

This will get you all the tree nodes and pages in the content tree. There is a field in the CMS_Document table that links the document with the given piece of structured content. The field name is DocumentForeignKeyValue.

So say you have a News content type with the following fields:

• NewsID
• NewsTitle
• NewsDate
• NewsSummary
• NewsDescription
• NewsImageUrl

When you run the above query, none of those fields will come over until you join the <codename>_News table with the view mentioned. Something like below:

select *
from view_cms_tree_joined
inner join <codename>_News on DocumentForeignKeyValue = NewsID
where classname = '<codename>.News'

This should get you all the conten tree items and the linked news items.

Knowing Kentico's underlying database structure and how to get that content in addition to how your content is structured will make or break your project's success.

Good luck!