When you manage a busy community site, switching to an entirely new content management system can be the stuff of dreams -- and nightmares. It can open up a world of opportunities to try new things and overcome past limitations. And it can also conjure catastrophic visions of glitches, crashes, and regretted investments. This month two well-established community news venues, Oakland Local and Voice of San Diego, both switched to a new content management system as part of their site redesigns. Here's how they did it, and what made these projects work.

At Oakland Local, the need to remain attractive and competitive -- especially on mobile devices -- was a key motivation for switching the site's complex back-end from Drupal to WordPress. Relaunched on May 18, the site now sports a clean responsive design, which automatically reconfigures itself to suit displays of any size, from a smartphone up to a large computer monitor.

"I was just looking at the site on my phone and I LOVE IT!" exclaimed editor/publisher Susan Mernit when I called to interview her. "It's just so beautiful!"

I helped launch Oakland Local back in 2009, so I'm aware of how complex its implementation of Drupal was -- quite innovative for the time (especially in terms of managing permissions for multiple contributors and editors), but also rather cumbersome to work with and more limited in display capabilities.

According to Mernit, while Drupal's mobile and responsive design features have improved, she felt that the capabilities of WordPress are better suited to the needs, staff, and users of Oakland Local over the long haul. "We wanted more multimedia, a more image-driven experience, better photo galleries. That's especially attractive to tablet users, because that's a fast-growing market."

Meanwhile, their frustrations with Drupal had been mounting. "Many third-party tools, such as for commenting or Facebook sign-in, that we tried to work with kept breaking. It hurt the level of interactivity and engagement for our site."

Mernit -- who has been involved with launches and redesigns of over 60 websites, from small projects up to NJ.com -- was aware of everything that could have gone wrong. However, "This was the easiest and least painful migration in my life," she said. "Nothing went wrong. It's unbelievable. Our developer maiki interi, who built our original site, did a brilliant job."

For a nominal fee, Oakland Local purchased the responsive WordPress theme Urban News, which interi customized. They also switched to a new web hosting service, WPengine, which specializes in hosting WordPress sites. And they installed Edit Flow, a WordPress plugin for back-end editorial management and team collaboration.

The results: Not only does Oakland Local look and function better (especially on mobile devices) -- load time is up 100%, Mernit said. They've also been seeing an increase in comments on the site, since the switch to WordPress fixed their sign-in problems. And having a more user-friendly back-end makes it easier for people to contribute content.

To minimize the risk and complexity of relaunching the site, they staged the deployment. Four months before they threw the switch to WordPress, Mernit and interi carefully planned a migration path.

"We decided to just move over our 300 top stories for the first stage of the migration -- like our coverage of the Oscar Grant murder," she explained. "We created an archive for content we weren't going to move immediately. That way, none of the links to our content will break, we won't lose any search traction. We've applied Google Analytics to both sites. And from the user's perspective, our past content didn't disappear. We're moving more stories over from the archive every week. But having a smaller database simplified the initial relaunch."

Concurrent with the switch to WordPress, Oakland Local also switched to a new ad server. "Our Drupal ad server was fine for basic ads, but advertisers want more precise targeting. We switched to Broadstreet Ads, which allows us to create zones for ads based on keywords or topics. So far they seem great."

Mernit estimates that using the Edit Flow plugin will save Oakland Local $15,000 per year through more efficient use of staff time. "Rather than publishing stories all at once every day, when we used to have people produce our front page for us, we now stagger stories throughout the day."

When the redesign was announced on Oakland Local's Facebook page, which has 9,000 followers, over 3,000 people went from Facebook to take a look. "There was a high level of community interest in our redesign," said Mernit. "We've gotten a lot of positive comments."

In the first week after the relaunch, Mernit said analytics showed an increase in return visits and time spent metrics. "But it's only been a week; we'll watch this closely over time," she said.

Meanwhile, in the other end of California, on May 15 the Voice of San Diego announced its redesign -- which also involved a switch to WordPress.

For VSD, improving their mobile experience was also a major driver for their redesign -- as was enhancing search visibility. It also has allowed them to add comment notifications, and the ability to follow ongoing issues across multiple stories via a new "narratives" feature.

CEO Scott Lewis, also noted that by switching to WordPress, VSD now can work with a much broader pool of developers and contractors -- expanding their options and giving them more room to control costs.

WordPress isn't the only CMS out there. Mernit recommends that any CMS upgrades should be based on your current and future needs, and not on prior commitments to tools, or whatever your current developer happens to be used to. Regardless of which CMS you choose, mobile is clearly becoming more important for community sites and their advertisers -- so features like responsive web design and easy integration with third-party mobile-friendly tools should be high on your requirements list.