How to Convert a Drupal site to WordPress.
Well I have done it. Something I have considered for some time for this site was to convert it from the Drupal CMS to WordPress.
Honestly I really liked Drupal and the way it all works but I had problems every time there was an upgrade. It would take me hours to get the site back on-line after a core upgrade and even some of the modules cause issues. It is also a big CMS with lots of functionality and really needs it’s own server to explore it’s full capability and deliver pages with speed and precision.
Contrast that with all bar one of the WordPress upgrades I have done on many different sites being totally fuss-free upgrades. WordPress has grown a lot since I first chose Drupal and now there are plugins for almost all the same functions. WordPress has a much smaller footprint and uses much less resources on the server so it can deliver the pages faster.
I did lose some of the functionality with the change but that is a relatively minor issue as those functions were not being used by the visitors in any case.
So I bit the bullet and spent several weeks checking, planning and testing. I got my start for this translation from this excellent post, Convert a Drupal 6 site to WordPress 2.7, my conversion was from Drupal 6 to WordPress 3.12.
The difference is that I created a page to make the transition much easier than playing in the MySQL database. Before you download my page I want you to understand that if everything stuffs up for you and you didn’t make back-ups of your database and website then that’s your problem. This is offered to help you make the switch but it is your responsibility to protect yourself.
Test this on your own local server, instructions for setting one up all over the Internet, before you do this on your production site so you can be sure it works as expected. It won’t convert everything because WordPress can’t use everything Drupal uses but it will migrate posts, taxonomy, users, comments and categories. I installed WordPress in it’s own directory in the main Bearly Books directory so I didn’t have to re-point the DNS.
Just right click the link and save as…
I am not going to be able to offer much technical support but installation is a matter of unzipping the file and uploading the contents into the server where the databases you want to convert live. Point your browser at the file and follow the instructions.
Good Luck. Please leave a comment and share the file.
P.S. I have just noticed that some of the links in the posts don’t work properly. This isn’t an issue with the conversion but an issue with hard coded links. The only real solution to this is to check all the posts and edit any links. Should only take a couple of days but that is a trap to watch out for.
The other thing I noticed is that a lot of the posts came through with categories intact but still didn’t display correctly. A bulk edit on the posts to tag them all with the same category corrected that, now I can reset them as I go through and edit any links.
I wanted to rejig the categories in any case so this isn’t a problem for me at this stage.
2 Responses to “How to Convert a Drupal site to WordPress.”
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Thanks for your comments. I hope that you are able to take that information and make good use of it.