Overview
After having some difficulty migrating to Drupal, American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) enlisted Drupal Connect's help in redeploying their website. AIER used Joomla! for their previous website, whose content needs to move to their new platform. AIER also sells print books and accepts donations. Some donations grant access to certain AIER membership levels, which have various perks. Constant Contact is used for email subscription management and marketing.
Solutions
To make things quick and easy, Drupal Connect migrated all of their content over with the same categories and users. The "Archive" items are a collection of PDF files (many scanned and OCRed) with content dating back to 1937! This content was imported separately to keep things clean and intact. Now that everything has moved over, AIER intends to further refine their content to better the user's overall experience and searching abilities. Ubercart was used to allow for easy scalability and automation of certain purchases. AIER now has the ability to configure donation membership tiers with automatic Drupal Role assignments. Drupal's Constant Contact module was quick to install and configure. Several Views were created to make content displays and reports easier to manage.
What would we do differently?
There were a few areas of the new Drupal site could be made more visually attractive. Joomla! has a central content type which divides things into sections. The analog used in Drupal was a single content type with taxonomy terms. To make things more flexible, however, it would be great to divide things up into more logical buckets with appropriate fields and custom design templates for each. The Migrate module could have been used to help divide content into those buckets with more planning and more time to execute that strategy.
