Buddypress

There is a world beyond Drupal. For the past few years, I have worked exclusively with Drupal as the base for my web sites. But recently, several customers have asked for help with different platforms. Lots more to learn, and hopefully something useful for the customers who use other CMS (Content Management Systems).

I had to migrate a site from Drupal to BuddyPress/WordPress (BP/WP).  Fortunately, this involved only a bit of a complex site: users, their friendships, their avatars, and their blogs.  I researched how others had done it, but there were no programs or modules or plugins that really solved my problems.  So I developed a PHP program to do the heavy lifting.  
 

My standard practice with Drupal sites is to copy the production site to a test site, and sometimes to a development site and a staging site. It's easy with Drupal. Just copy the database and files, and restore them to the new location, edit the settings file, and you are good to go. Not so easy with WordPress. For some reason, the URL is hard coded in the site database in many places, and in some serialized strings. One module also hard codes the absolute file path. Ugh.

updated 4-17-2011
Well, actually, is there life beside Drupal? I have been using Drupal as my exclusive CMS platform for the last 4 years, and I really like it. But are there some times when it isn't the best?
 
I have a client who had a complex site built using Drupal. The people who built it customized it greatly, and then he fired them. I have been struggling to learn and maintain it. So he looked for alternatives and discovered BuddyPress, which is WordPress with a social networking plugin.
 
WordPress plugin == Drupal module