Collaborative Content Teams

So we've done quite a few things to prepare for our content migration (from a static html site to a Drupal-based site).

I've had decent luck with a test run of the Import HTML Drupal module (though I could only test it on one of my laptop-based stacks because it has some PHP prerequisites that precluded running it elsewhere (on hosted sites), such as the HTML Tidy PHP library & XML/XSL support). I also had to first detach our dynamic web templates & get rid of the header & footer include file statements to ensure that I wasn't getting extra junk...

We've defined a high-level taxonomy that were turned into content teams. The taxonomy was gleaned from the hard work of our taxonomy team (with the much-appreciated help of volunteer card sorters who took the top 100 pages of our current site & sorted them into categories they felt were appropriate, then gave those categories labels. BTW, though I didn't run stats as to how much difference there was, the card sort exercises did clearly demonstrate how much deeper (than non-librarian card sorters) the librarians wanted to go into categorization. Not a big surprise, I suppose, but I think it helps us to see how our navigation schemes have gotten so convoluted.)

The content teams are now assigned with telling me which pages in their areas can just be imported in (vs. those that have to be rewritten or rethought).

I tried to exclude from the teams' lists the content pages which would lend themselves to the creation of new content types (using the CCK module) & the use of the Views module to assemble that segmented content in what will appear to the end-user as a page, but I've probably missed a few.

Currently, I'm trying out the Links Package module in response to a discussion that came up in the first of our content team meetings. I feel like the all of the discussion and feedback from our content teams is already helping us to hone our migration strategy. The product will be better tomorrow because of our debates and decisions today. And that's a key benefit of collaborative work.