Returning from my sabbatical, as promised I’m catching up on blogging about previous projects. For one such project, I was contracted by Acquia to provide migration assistance to a client of theirs [redacted, but let’s call them Acme].
Those of you with an interest in Drupal migration may have noticed my absence in the last several months. A confluence of things led me to take a break from the Drupal community: a bout of physical exhaustion (initially diagnosed as Lyme disease, and then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯); professional exhaustion managing the D8 migration core initiative and maintaining a few contrib modules on top of paid contracts; and emotional exhaustion from the community drama of early last year.
I did make one comment on Dries’ blog in the immediate aftermath of learning about the situation which is roiling the Drupal community, but since then have taken some time to listen and ponder. The community is in deep pain now, and many of us are reacting to that pain with anger. Trust is in short supply. Healing seems nearly impossible.
MidCamp is imminent, and I'm proud to announce that Virtuoso Performance (i.e., me!) is sponsoring a "Drupal Expert Is In" session Saturday April 1 at 1pm. I'll be in the main room (120) to answer your Drupal 8 migration questions, help you get through any tricky plugin issues, and demonstrate how to approach migration problems.
I’m running a bit behind, but I want to make it a practice to blog about each migration project I’m involved with (with each client’s permission, of course). Constructed examples are all well and good, but there’s nothing like real-world scenarios to give the flavor of using the migration framework in practice.
So, last week the next arena for me to work on came up as XML/JSON source plugins (see my companion piece for more on that). My intention had been to hold off tackling wordpress_migrate until "nailing down" the XML parser plugin it depends on, but I decided that at least trying to prototype a WordPress migration would be a good test of the XML plugin.
I put some work in last week on implementing wordpress_migrate for Drupal 8 (read more in the companion piece). So, this seems a good point to talk about the source plugin work that's based on, supporting XML and JSON sources in migrate_plus.
As I wrote in my last blog post, I'd like to try doing regular sprint days for Drupal 8 migration. These will be a bit more informal than than a conference sprint - basically, a day when anyone interested in helping move the migration system from its experimental status to a fully supported subsystem of Drupal core can show up in #drupal-migrate, or just pick a relevant issue and start working on it.
DrupalCon NOLA is over - perhaps too soon for those of us who love this great city, or perhaps just soon enough for those who have given Drupal and the city of New Orleans every last ounce of energy they had this past week.
We had a very productive week sprinting for migration - it may not be reflected in the number of commits made by the end of the extended sprints, but we'll see the fruits over the coming weeks. Our focus was on triaging the issue queue, and on diving deeply into some of the more complex outstanding issues, rather than picking the low-hanging fruit.
Again, in the interests of timeliness I'll stick to a simple chronological wrapup of the day. And in the interests of of-course-everyone-cares-what-Mike-eats, I will continue subjecting you to my culinary adventures - breakfast at the Clover Grill in the midst of tourist land (Bourbon Street). Good, basic diner food - eggs over easy with bacon and hash browns, the primary goal here was to make it quick and get to the convention center in time for the prenote (which I have somehow never managed to rouse myself in time for at previous DrupalCons).