Now, why should you consider moving to Drupal, especially Drupal 10?

1. Active and Vibrant Community: Drupal has one of the largest open-source communities. This means continuous improvements, a wealth of modules and themes, and a support system that's always buzzing.
2. Continuous innovation: Drupal's constant innovation, driven by its passionate community, keeps it ahead with advanced features and enhancements. New strategic initiatives like Drupal Starshot, Project Browser, Experience Builder, Recipes, and Automatic Updates are poised to revolutionize the Drupal experience, making it more intuitive, efficient, and adaptable than ever before. 
3. Cutting-Edge Features: Drupal 10 comes packed with modern features. It leverages Symfony 6 and Twig 3, ensuring your site is not just robust but also future-proof. The new admin theme, Claro, and the front-end theme, Olivero, offer a more intuitive and visually appealing experience.
4. Effective editorial workflow system: With Drupal, end users can easily create and manage workflows tailored to their organization's needs and adjust them on-demand as necessary which is becoming more and more of a demand today.  In comparison, DNN's customization options and support for complex editorial workflows often require extensive coding knowledge. 
5. Scalability and Flexibility: Like DNN, Drupal is known for its scalability. However, Drupal takes it a step further with its flexible content architecture, allowing you to create and manage various content types with ease.
6. Security: Drupal is renowned for its strong security track record. The Drupal Security Team actively monitors and addresses vulnerabilities, giving you peace of mind.
7. SEO and Performance: Drupal 10 includes out-of-the-box features that help improve SEO and site performance. From clean URLs to advanced caching mechanisms, it’s designed to help your site rank better and load faster.
8. Accessibility: Drupal is committed to web accessibility standards, ensuring your site is usable by everyone.
9. Extensive Ecosystem: With thousands of modules and themes, Drupal offers a vast ecosystem to extend your site's functionality without reinventing the wheel.

By switching to Drupal 10, you're stepping into a future-ready, secure, and highly customizable environment. It's a move that can significantly improve your digital presence and provide a solid foundation for growth.

Before you begin your DNN to Drupal migration, we recommend reading this article to get yourself prepped for a migration regardless of the version. It covers what information you should share with your Drupal development partner. This migration is also a perfect time to add those extra features or third-party integrations you've always wanted. Additionally, it's a great opportunity to revamp your website's design and user experience if needed. Consider your website’s current SEO positioning and how you would like to optimize it.

Once you've considered everything, create a backup of your website to avoid any accidental changes or data loss. Next, make a checklist of your content structure, including content types, URLs, metadata, and media files. After this, let the Drupal migration experts take over.

Here’s a 4-step migration process that is (or should ideally be) followed by your Drupal migration partner:

1. Migration Audit

1. Identify your DNN website features, functionality, modules, and content structure
2. Conduct a detailed analysis to understand the digital landscape
3. Catalog content views for easier replication
4. Develop a strategic content migration strategy

2. Build Application

1. Meticulously rebuild content structure and theme
2. Replicate website features, add new features
3. Conduct thorough regression testing
4. Ensure a solid foundation, seamless functionality, and flawless performance

3. Migrate Content

1. Content extraction from your database in a CSV, XML or JSON format
2. Ensure a seamless transition from DNN to the latest Drupal version
3. Import all contents and valuable assets, match them with the freshly created content types and fields
4. Meticulously validate the entire data migration process for data accuracy and completeness.

4. Testing

1. Thoroughly test migrated data for sanity and integrity.
2. Subject replicated features to smoke testing and load testing.
3. Guarantee seamless performance under various scenarios.
4. Conduct meticulous security checks.

The client (Stamats) approached us with a two-fold issue. They had three magazine sites on a legacy version of DNN that was riddled with malware and needed major work for the migration to Drupal. Among those sites was MeetingsToday.com. 

Meetings Today was several years old, and had more than 20,000 articles in DNN. There was also extensive functionality related to their physical magazine, events, podcasts, webinars, and more. Their primary goal was to retain and grow their audience. They were experiencing issues with editing, and an uncertain future. The challenge came to Specbee to create a Drupal distribution that could serve the core publishing needs of several online magazine sites built in DNN. 

So we built a custom Drupal distribution to save them time and money in the long term. This approach allowed any new feature developed for one site to be easily implemented across all sites while preserving their unique designs. It also gave them the ability to spin up a new publishing site without building a brand new website from scratch getting them to market 10x faster. 

Specbee delivered a solution that allowed for Drupal's powerful editorial controls and publishing tools for multiple sites while allowing those sites to retain their unique functionality.

References

• https://devessence.com/blog/!/22/what-is-your-dnn-migration-strategy/
• https://www.dnnsoftware.com/community-blog/cid/134716/asp-net-mvc-and-dotnetnuke
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunbrucewalker/

We understand that migrations are never an easy decision for any business. While entrusting a reliable technology partner can alleviate some concerns, it's crucial to dedicate your attention and time before handing over the reins. By choosing the right Drupal partner (such as Specbee, a certified Drupal migration partner), you can streamline the migration process, making it as seamless and painless as possible. Still wondering if you should migrate your DNN website to Drupal? Give us a call and we’ll help you make the right decision.