Every night for the next month, while I am sleeping, all of the data in the Drupal 5 version of Observer.com will migrate to the Drupal 6 version. This means that our editors will always get to see yesterday's content on the build site of the Drupal 6 version and we will have witnessed more than 30 (hopefully) successful data migrations and have plenty of time to make adjustments. When we're ready to launch the site, we'll just let the data migrate as usual, then dump the newly created database and files directory, install them on the production MySQL and NFS servers, and change Apache's configuration to point to the Drupal 6 version--it couldn't be easier, and it won't take me longer than thirty minutes. So the why of this should be pretty obvious who's done this sort of migration before. But the how isn't so clear, or it wouldn't have taken me so long to get right.

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Some comments I received for my post about coming to terms with Drupal requested a list of Modules that I trust. I considered several approaches, including starting a database of modules with my reviews. I decided against that--I would hate to sound authoritative on which Drupal modules are good and which are bad because I haven't used so many of them, so I'm just going to discuss my experience with some common modules and hope that it helps. This is absolutely just my subjective opinion having run these modules for over a year on Observer.com and Politicker.com. I will vouch for these modules to the extent they will only ruin your life if you use them badly. Of course, your mileage may vary wildly, and if you're running or starting a site of any scale, please don't just take my word for it.

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