The state of the Virtualmin.com Drupal 7 migration (with numbers!)

Howdy all,

I've been working on a migration of Virtualmin.com to a new server and Drupal 7. We're currently running Drupal 6, and, as everybody probably knows, we have some complaints about how everything works. The Drupal 7 migration will fix some of those issues, and it will make it easier or me to fix some of the others.

Migration is proving much more complex than I would have expected. There are a few reasons for this:

• We're migrating from Ubercart to Drupal Commerce (I think; I haven't yet gotten that far in the migration, but it looks like the most promising option)
• project_issue (the ticket tracker we use, and the ticket tracker used for the Drupal.org tracker) has a very fragile migration process that I have not yet managed to make work
• Some of the custom Drupal modules I wrote for license management and such have to be rewritten to support the changes in Drupal 7, and to add features that have been missing

But, tonight I have finally gotten the migrate framework working, and seemingly doing what it's supposed to. I have some confidence I'll have a working copy of our site in Drupal 7 by tomorrow, which will allow me to get back to migrating my custom modules (I've done the API changes, but haven't actually tested them with live data and having tied them to the new shopping cart).

Anyway, since this is taking longer than expected, and I wanted to be reporting a completed migration already, I figured I'd post something with some interesting numbers that I haven't looked at in a while and that some folks in the community might find interesting.

• Number of Users - 67998 I suspect half of these are spammers that never actually posted spam, due to various antispam measures stopping them, but I believe we probably have 30k+ real human users.
• Forum Nodes - 15526 This is the number of forum topics that have been posted.
• Forum Comments - 60290 This is the number of forum topic replies that have been posted.
• Project Issue Nodes - 14431 The number of support/bug tickets opened in the ticket tracker.
• Project Issue Comments - 81365 The number of comments posted in reply to posts in the tracker.

The vast majority of nodes and comments are legitimate (like 99.9+%), as we delete any spam that arrives. So, that's a lot of forum posts and tickets! I didn't realize how much we'd grown since our last migration about six years ago, when I migrated everything over from Joomla. I believe we had about 9000 users at that time, and a whole lot less discussions.

On other fronts, we have, I believe, about 100,000 installations of Virtualmin (GPL and Pro, mostly GPL) and about 1,000,000 installations of Webmin running worldwide, though these numbers are harder to estimate with confidence, since so many downloads come from sources out of our control; but, I think this is a reasonable estimate because on the number of downloads from our servers.

And, all of these usage indicators are increasing. So, while we're making fewer sales than I'd like lately (and we'll need to figure something out to make up the budgetary shortfall if we're going to keep working on things the way we have been), usage growth has been great!

Thanks to everybody who's helped out here in the community over all these years!

Cheers,

Joe