Migration of sosaci.net, a website operated by Společnost pro osvětu spisovatelů.
The sosaci.net website had been running on Drupal 7 for many years and had gradually grown into a large ecosystem comprising dozens of content types, thousands of articles and tens of thousands of comments. Moving to Drupal 11 was therefore not a simple update, but a full migration between two substantially different generations of Drupal.
The old hosting environment also presented performance problems. Some features had to be restricted because the database could no longer handle them reliably. The hosting service did not provide command-line access either, making it unsuitable for maintaining a Drupal 11 website. The project therefore also included moving the website to new hosting provided by Websupport.
The most challenging parts of the project
Large Drupal 7 migrations often involve similar technical obstacles, although their scale varies. Three areas were particularly challenging in this project:
- Finding the correct migration sequence: although Drupal appeared to run the migrations automatically in the correct order, some entities were not connected properly and parts of the migration had to be repeated. Migrating tens of thousands of comments took almost two days and occasionally stalled. Some data could not be migrated through the standard process and had to be exported manually from Drupal 7 as CSV files and imported into the new website using the Feeds module.
- Rebuilding Views: Drupal 7 Views and Drupal 11 Views differ considerably, and a direct one-to-one conversion is rarely possible. Some modules and fields used by the old website were no longer available, causing the migrated Views to fail. The Drupal 7 website also used separate content types and Views for many recurring activities, including annual fiction-writing events.
- Website-specific features – rating content with ducks: the website used the Rating (Rate) module to let users rate content with duck icons. This popular feature had previously placed a considerable load on the database and had to be disabled on the old hosting. Following the migration, it works normally again.
What Drupal 11 brought to the website
For a website of this size, migration is valuable for more than simply keeping the software current. Its main practical benefits include:
- long-term maintainability and security, as Drupal 7 is now a legacy platform,
- a more modern content-editing experience,
- a cleaner structure and better opportunities for future development,
- easier updates and maintenance using command-line tools.