Utilizing/ Converting another database with craft

Question

(First off, I apologize for the really long question, but any help I can get would be appreciated!)

Hello! I am taking over a bunch of sites that a developer had created for a company (I am not a developer, but I have some coding knowledge and wordpress experience). Anyway, I want to switch over the site from just php and sql to a CMS and I feel like Craft might be the one. However, I feel like it might just be over my head.

Basically the cms needs to manage an event (or if 1 instance of Craft can handle multiple events, each with its own website, even better!) Each event visits up to 40 cities a year and has up to 3500 attendees at each one. And all information regarding attendees, venue, host hotel, faculty, schedule, etc. is all stored in a data base. And all that information is displayed on the site on pages that are created dynamically by the cities name, year, etc..

My question is: How would I transfer all of that into Craft and organize it appropriately? And would this be possible for someone with limited knowledge of coding?

I am willing to do all the research necessary, or if its way out of my league, hire a developer to do it for me. I just need a nudge in the right direction.

Thanks for your time! -Alex

Answer 1

Welcome to Craft! Craft does not require coding experience to set up fields and relationships (attendees to events, for example). All of that is handled from the control panel.

Displaying the fields on the frontend requires some knowledge of Twig, the templating engine Craft uses.

Transferring the data may require some pretty heavy coding, depending on how the data is currently structured. There are a few importing plugins (here's a popular one) that might be able to help. From your numbers above, migrating by hand may not be an option, so you might need to invest in some research or hire a developer to help with that phase.

Craft has a lot to offer out of the box in terms of organizing content. I could see you making use out of singles and structures to manage events, hotels, attendees, etc. I recommend reading through the introduction documentation to get a hold on how Craft is set up.