From Vancouver to Vladivostok via I18N and Views: Migrating osce.org to Drupal

The OSCE is in the process of migrating its website from an in-house CMS to Drupal.

With 56 States drawn from Europe, Central Asia and America, the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) is the world’s largest regional security organization, bringing comprehensive and co-operative security to a region that stretches from Vancouver to Vladivostok. The OSCE’s unique network of field missions in South-Eastern and Eastern Europe and Central Asia poses unique web communications challenges, the biggest of which is enabling missions to manage content in multiple languages.

In 2008, recognizing that its website had outgrown the custom-built CMS, the OSCE embarked on a complete revamp project. This involves changing the website's information architecture, its look and feel, and the underlying technology. The new website will be launched at the end of 2009. This presentation showcases how the OSCE is tackling the key issues it faces in migrating its website to Drupal.

The presentation will cover the following aspects of the project:

• The business case: why we chose Drupal from among the many other open-source content management systems.
• Making sure that Drupal is the right tool for the job: building a proof-of-concept.
• Dealing with the legacy: migrating circa 40,000 content items to CCK.
• Improving Drupal’s usability: developing a custom module for selecting and referencing content items (Nodereference Explorer).
• Working with the community: maintaining a project at drupal.org
• Making sure it works: building and testing the system.

Co-presenters:

Gottfried Nindl, Web Developer, OSCE