Content That Travels: Comparing Migration Formats for Drupal
Content arrives in many forms: unstructured text, Word documents, spreadsheets, CSV files, SQL dumps, HTML, WordPress WXR, and other XML formats. Drupal also has its own solutions, including the Default Content module.
Each format preserves some things and loses others. Some are easy for humans to understand but difficult for machines to process. Others preserve complex relationships but require specialized tools or knowledge to inspect.
In this session, we'll compare these common migration formats, examining their strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs. What happens to content structure, metadata, relationships, and editorial context as content moves between systems?
We'll also explore emerging approaches built around structured JSON and YAML, including Toadshade, an open-source page-bundle format that packages each page as a human-readable narrative, a structural skeleton, and Drupal-importable YAML.
Audience: Drupal developers and site builders who have performed a migration or expect to undertake one.
Takeaway: A practical framework for evaluating migration formats, an understanding of what different formats preserve or discard, and an introduction to structured page bundles.
Each format preserves some things and loses others. Some are easy for humans to understand but difficult for machines to process. Others preserve complex relationships but require specialized tools or knowledge to inspect.
In this session, we'll compare these common migration formats, examining their strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs. What happens to content structure, metadata, relationships, and editorial context as content moves between systems?
We'll also explore emerging approaches built around structured JSON and YAML, including Toadshade, an open-source page-bundle format that packages each page as a human-readable narrative, a structural skeleton, and Drupal-importable YAML.
Audience: Drupal developers and site builders who have performed a migration or expect to undertake one.
Takeaway: A practical framework for evaluating migration formats, an understanding of what different formats preserve or discard, and an introduction to structured page bundles.