CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Do it!

For me it was smooth as silk (and I've now done it twice -- porting my standalone production site to a new production site and to a test site).

The civicrm system really was built to work under drupal and the security interface is a lot tidier and as far, as I can see so far, relatively bug free.  We had a lot of little problems with standalone.  Although we were very pleased with standalone we are even more pleased with the drupal version -- plus you get all of drupal to work with if you want!  Plus the user community seems to be much larger.

These migration instructions were basically good: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Migrating+from+Joomla+to+Drupal.

It's almost easier if you are moving sites at the same time -- see http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Moving+an+Existing+Installation+to+a+New+Server+or+Location

The sequence that worked smoothly for me on a virtural private server was:

(1) Upgrade your standalone site to 3.0.x if you haven't done already -- this will update your database with some new fields; you need to run through the upgrade process to do that.
(1A) Dump your upgraded database (using mysqldump)
(2) Create a new domain (or blow away your old domain, keeping code and MySQL backups in a very safe place).
(3) Install Drupal virgin new according to the excellent instructions at drupal.org.  (The only pitfall that I hit was using my root shell access to do this -- the result was a host of permission problems because root owned a lot of files; use the shell user-id associated with your new domain.)
(4) Install Civicrm virgin new under Drupal -- this leads to all the config stuff being set properly.  Complete civi installation through creation of drupal userids with access permissions.
(5) Drop all the tables under the virgin Civicrm database though phpmyadmin (you'll get foreign-key errors when you attempt to drop all; don't worry, repeating the drop 5 times will hack through the layers of interdependence progressively down to a blank database).
(6) use the source command to upload the dump of your previously upgraded database to the new database
(7) execute the sql commands in the migration instructions linked to above to blow away uf_match, config_backend and menu.

Then log in to drupal and select civicrm and the applications are smart enough to reconfigure the backend and menus by themselves.  Of course, you then need to go in and configure your own preferences again and also map the Drupal users to contacts (logout and log back in to drupal before resynchronizing contacts--otw get database error)

Thank you to the developers!