EW.com, the digital site for Entertainment Weekly and a top entertainment news site, migrated in January 2015 from Vignette 6 CMS and 10 different WordPress blogs to a single unified platform built on Drupal 7. Join both Four Kitchens and Time Inc. engineers on the project as we discuss the process, starting with discovery all the way through launch preparation.

Challenges included:

Migrating close to 219k posts, 292k images, and 475k terms into Drupal without spilling a drop
Separating overloaded freeform tags into specific vocabularies and creative works
Maintaining a high performance backend and frontend with multiple distributed caching layers
Coordinating distributed teams across multiple continents
Enforcing best practices, code quality and standards
High speed integrations with an existing and complex advertising system
Porting legacy, non-standard code and maintaining functional parity
We’ll also discuss:

Development environments using unified Virtual Machines
Custom Drupal distributions used across multiple in-house groups for different projects
Promoting open-source culture in a commercial environment
This is a follow-up to the 2014 DrupalCon Session Time Inc's Big Move to Drupal, and was presented at SANDcamp 2015.