My pet project over the past couple of months finally launched on April 11. CreativeBits is a design and Mac enthusiast community, featuring design critiques, advice, and tips. Ivan, the site owner, approached me in December to work with him to convert the Blogger and phpBB site to Drupal. Between January and April, most of my free time was spent preparing the site for launch.
I wrote an import script for MovableType previously, so I already had a lot of the know-how for the Blogger and phpBB import scripts. Blogger has very straight-forward template documentation, which made it easy to create a template that slurps up all of the blog posts and comments for import. On the other hand, I had to grope around in the dark to figure out the phpBB database structure. The finished products are available in my Drupal.org sandbox.
While I worked on the import scripts, Ivan designed two themes for the site, giving it a distinct, fresh look. We converted the site over a weekend, choosing to take the old content offline to ease importation. The site launched to rave reviews from previous users, but wasn't without its hiccups. Due to a problem with the way I setup the new site, some of the posts imported from phpBB were attributed to the wrong user. I spent a lot of time hand-editing the database to correct user IDs, but everything turned out fine in the end.
Since its relaunch, CreativeBits has doubled its user base. The site is easier to use than ever, thanks to features like a single login for the entire site (compared to separate logins for Blogger and phpBB). Original content keeps pouring in and it looks like Drupal is giving them everything they need to turn into a mature, sophisticated community.
I've posted various other details about the conversion in the CreativeBits forum and the Drupal showcase forum. All-in-all, a job well done.
Note: Comments with a light blue background were made by the site owner.
well,
although i totally have no use whatsoever for that site... i passed along the link to immanuel, who is both a mac user and a graphic artist type. anyway, glad to know you're as geeky as ever. what's your schedule like when you get here? hope you're having a happy wednesday - i hafta go check on the copies i was making... byeee!