As co-organizer of the Triangle Drupal group, I've met some great people who have had some terrible experiences with Drupal. At the same time, I have become increasingly frustrated by my inability to accurately predict what Drupal projects will succeed and which will fail.

Preparation

A. Upgrade modules and Drupal core code

Although it’s tempting to move your files and database quickly, I strongly recommend doing some preparation first. Before I move Drupal site, I always first check for any new Drupal core and module updates. If there are modules that need to be updated, I do the update before moving my site. The advantage of this is that it is easier later on to debug any problems that arise during the migration if you are already using the latest version of all Drupal code.

I presented on Drupal at UNC's An Introduction to Content Management Systems workshop last week. The presentation is geared to people trying to decide between Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress. I hope that I swayed a few to the Drupal camp!

I often have a hard time deciding whether to use a CCK field or the taxonomy module when building Drupal sites. At Drupalcon, I was glad to see that I am not alone in my confusion. At the Drupalcon Drupal Taxonomy Revisted session, I finally started to understand the use case for each.

Every once in awhile, when working on a Drupal site, my content either disappears or I cannot log-in. At this point, I usually get rather angry and start thinking of worse case scenarios. What if I can never log into my site again? What if anonymous users can't read articles?

In a rare moment of clarity, I put together the following Drupal permissions debugging checklist. I hope that you find it as useful as I have.

1. Check user access control and make sure that all users can "access content"
Path: mysite.com/admin/user/access