Site migration from Drupal to WordPress - Question about Drupal Back end

[danatanseo]

This is really a developer/Webmaster issue. The closest category available to select was "Technical SEO" - but technically, this isn't a question about SEO, per se.

I am doing free SEO work for a local arts organization as my way of giving them a charitable contribution. Despite my advice to stay on Drupal and improve the site on its current platform, they want something easier to manage for volunteers. This is perfectly understandable, although not my recommendation.

Of course, not knowing anything about SEO, their first impulse was to simply shut down the old site, cancel all of their old pages, point the domain to their new WordPress site and completely start over. Thank goodness I yelled "Halt!" before they went this far

They really have no idea what they are doing and I want to help guide them through this process in a way that preserves as much as possible their inbound links (they have tons of .edu and .gov links because they are a local community arts organization). Of course they don't understand how valuable these are, so I have a lot of educating to do.

I am trying to get them a quote from a professional developer to help migrate from Drupal to WordPress. The only login information anyone has been able to send me is login to their FTP. No one seems to have a login for the Drupal CMS back end, and when I asked for it they looked like deer caught in headlights

Can someone tell me, or even send me a screenshot of what the admin login page looks like for a Drupal site, so I can explain better to this client what I am looking for? I have no experience with Drupal, but surely, there is a backend where the site pages and content can be updated.? There must also be a database of customers/registrants, etc. not to mention a place where all the meta tags, etc can be entered and stored?

Last but not least, if no one is able to find their site's Drupal login info, is there any way under the sun for me to retrieve it for them?

I have a Developer in mind whose got loads of experience migrating from Drupal to WP, but he needs a .sql export file with the contents of the curent databse in order to give us a quote.  Does anyone have any advice? (Other than "This should teach you not to offer your services up to charity!" LOL)

[ThompsonPaul]

Glad I could assist, Dana. Good luck!

P.

[danatanseo]

Thanks very much Paul! This is wonderfully helpful. I do believe they have their hosting information so we should be able to proceed this way if necessary. I appreciate you pointing me in the right direction!

Dana

[GeorgeAndrews]

Paul's advice is sound Dana, shouldn't take too long to do either.

[ThompsonPaul]

Dana, if "all" you need from the old install is a .sql export, that can be done from the hosting control panel (eg cPanel) or directly from phpMyAdmin even if there's no hosting control panel in use. That eliminates the need to access the Drupal install altogether

I would find out who they're hosting with and if they have the hosting control panel credentials, log in there and retrieve the sql dump. If they don't have the credentials, it's usually only a few minutes with the hosting company proving you have all the payment info necessary to prove that you (ie the arts org) own the hosting account. Then the host will provide new credentials and you can go ahead with the sql dump.

Paul

[danatanseo]

Thanks Jason,

Yes, that appears that it might be it. Of course I am getting an "Access Denied" response right now which is understandable. I have sent this along to the folks at the organization in hopes it rings a bell and they can track down login credentials.

I just discovered that the way they've been "updating" the site for the past several months is by creating PDFs and uploading them via FTP

ugh...

[SixTwoInteractive]

There will generally be a "login" button on the front page of the website. If not, try this....

The path is:

http://domainname.com/?q=user