I accidentally started publishing open source software in 2006, the first integration of the QuickBooks Web Connector with anything. This was pre-Ubercart when I was just cutting my teeth on PHP / MySQL development at Prima Supply, and I thought it would be fun to claim the code was written by wombats while I just published it online. I decided to own the silliness and start blogging on bywombats.com using Drupal 4.7 at the time - and immediately picked up a freelance contract doing QuickBooks integration work.

Fast forward a few years, a couple of eCommerce projects, and a Drupal startup, and the moniker has apparently run its course. A lot of folks over the years assumed "By Wombats" was the name of a Drupal shop and tried to contact me for work. Little did they know my site's contact form hasn't been working for years.

This past week I finally got around to fixing that by moving from Rackspace to Digital Ocean and configuring my server to send mail through Mandrill. I upgraded to Drupal 7 (about time?) and played around with Mike Crittenden's Meedjum theme until I liked the look. He's presently trying to bribe me to help maintain the theme, but I'm holding out for better beer.

Migrating was the fun part, as it was my first opportunity to make use of the Drupal-to-Drupal data migration module. I couldn't get moving files to work for some reason, but I figured out how to make options settings work in the configuration form (leave the select lists alone and put the value in the "Default value" text field) to make use of the preserve_files option. I copied the old files to the Drupal 7 files directory and ran the migration with that flag set for it to start managing the files that were already in the directory.

Migrating taxonomy terms was straightforward, but it took me a while to get blog posts right. I learned I had to select the taxonomy term migration in the "Source migration" select list to ensure blog posts got created in the Drupal 7 site referencing the correct term ID (since they changed during migration). I had to do the same for files, choosing the "Upload [upload]" source field and selecting the file migration I used as the source migration. I also had to set the optional MigrateFile class to "MigrateFileFid" to ensure the new blog's file field referenced the appropriate file IDs.

Perhaps the best thing about Migrate is its ability to rollback migrations and re-import them to debug the process. I did this several times for the various migrations. I also made use of its ability to import a representative subset of the awaiting content while I was debugging the term / file association process. Clever module - Mike Ryan rocks.

The future for this blog is a consolidation of various other things I'm doing online, including blogging about life in Greenville, SC (hint: it rocks) and Roguelikes / indie games (again with the Wordpress?). Once that's done, I'll carry on with the blogging about Drupal, startups, and a few other things, including my recent explorations with R and Commerce Guys's Platform.

I hope to hear from you soon.