Restructuring Drupal Content with Migrations and Paragraphs

Jaymie Strecker describes a real-world Drupal migration used to refactor how creator data is stored across multiple content types. Over time, the site had accumulated different structures for representing authors and creators, making maintenance and theming difficult. The solution was to migrate content from an old article type that stored creators as taxonomy terms into a new article type that uses nested paragraphs. This unifies the data model and allows new content types to reuse the same structure and presentation.

The post explains how the create_default_paragraph_revision process plugin from the Migration Tools module is used to generate paragraph entities during the node migration. Jaymie details how sub_process, multiple_values, and callback plugins are combined to iterate over taxonomy terms and wrap each value in a single_creator paragraph inside a creator_list paragraph. The article also covers Drupal 10 and Drupal 11 differences, rollback behaviour, and alternatives for modifying existing nodes instead of creating new ones. The example demonstrates how Drupal migrations can be used not only for imports but also for internal content restructuring.