Missing Features

Droptopia is a visual portfolio of the best Drupal shops anywhere. (More on Droptopia.) It’s a really easy way to find a great Drupal shop by budget (say over $50,000) and location (say for Chicago). We have lots of cities listed.

I wanted to move Droptopia to better hosting at about the same time I found out about Pantheon Drupal. Pantheon isn’t Drupal hosting, it’s a platform for Drupal. Baked into its service is a load of developer goodies like Varnish, Memcached, Apache Solr, and Jenkins. Code is managed in a hosted Git repository and you get three sites for each Drupal site — dev, stage, and production — complete with 1-click deployment scripts you run from the web dashboard to manage releases.

Migrating to Pantheon was dead-simple. The first step was to tar up a dump of the database and the web root. Then I used the Pantheon import wizard and pointed it to the tar file:

The Pantheon wizard for importing a new site

Once you hit the “Confirm” button you get taken to a cool log screen that shows you the progress of the import in real-time. The Droptopia export was over 300 MB and Pantheon had the site completely set up in less than four minutes.

The best part was Pantheon noticed during the import that my site was running Drupal 6.20 core and did the Drupal core upgrade for me while the site was being imported. That is ridiculously slick.

I’ve pushed a few minor code updates using the deployment workflow. So far everything is easy and the site is running great. Drupal just got a lot less painful.

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