Converting multiple WordPress-powered sites to single Drupal install

April 3, 2007 2:05 PM

I would like to convert multiple WordPress sites to one Drupal installation (more inside)

[Apologies for long-winded explanation up front, thought more detail was better than less so you could see what I'm aiming for in the end]

I'm working on a new Drupal-powered site that will handle e-commerce and other things better than my current setup. Right now, I have an osCommerce-powered shop website, and multiple separate domains, each running their own install of WordPress, with blogs/other info about my books/stuff. I want to combine them all into one big, bad Drupal install so I don't have to maintain a kabillion different WP installs.

In an ideal world, I would import ALL existing entries from the other WordPress sites into the new Drupal db and then go back through and re-tag them as needed (for example: posts from knitgrrl.com would get tagged with 'Knitgrrl' as well as existing category tags, posts from alternationbook.com get tagged 'AlterNation,' etc).

Once all the entries from various WordPress blogs are imported, and each new Drupal category tag has its own RSS feed, I'll redirect the original URLs accordingly. So, if you go to knitgrrl.com, it will redirect you to the Knitgrrl-tagged category feed on the new site. Or I'll figure out how to display that feed only on knitgrrl.com (any hints on doing that?)

And now -- the crux of the question -- has anyone used this conversion program? I'm on Mac, which he doesn't offer, but before I pay someone to help me run this another way, I want to know if it'll do the trick well, or if there's a more Mac-friendly option. Or, an easier way in general.

Any and all suggestions, ideas, links and help is very, very welcome -- thanks!

posted by bitter-girl.com to computers & internet (6 comments total)

The thought of doing this just makes me shudder! I'm not sure I have much helpful advice -- I would just say to become very familiar with the way drupal works, since it's quite an odd bird and a definite step up in terms of both flexibility and complexity. It looks the site you linked to offers some very high-level thoughts on how wordpress elements might map to drupal elements. I'm afraid I don't know of a mac version of something like this.

Rather than have someone build a converter for Mac, perhaps you could hire someone to simply run the program on their windows machine. You could ship them all your MySQL databases via text files of SQL statements. If they're already set up with MySQL, etc., it shouldn't take them terribly long.
posted by treepour at 4:40 PM on April 3, 2007

Yeah, that's what I was thinking (have a Windows person run it for me). But meanwhile I found another converter program that seems ok -- it's just that the taxonomy system of Drupal is so different from WP, I might have to do some manual tweaking of old content no matter what I choose.

Bah!

(I know I said this the last time I switched, from MT to WP, but THIS IS THE LAST TIME I AM DOING THIS).

You know, until the next time... thanks!
posted by bitter-girl.com at 4:46 PM on April 3, 2007

This will either help matters or make them more confusing (or both) -- but if you haven't already, you might take a look at the category plugin. In a nutshell, this assists with creating hierarchical content. (Be aware that the plugin -- like many drupal plugins -- adds and utilizes its own set of tables in your drupal MySQL database -- so it will add a layer of complexity to how you convert/populate your tables).
posted by treepour at 5:01 PM on April 3, 2007

Something that I had not even thought of! thanks!
posted by bitter-girl.com at 5:51 AM on April 4, 2007

Been there, done that. You'd be better off manually reinputting much of the WP content. Trust me.
posted by fourcheesemac at 5:53 AM on April 4, 2007

Uh oh... I was afraid of that.

(she said, thinking of the thousands of things that need to be brought over...)
posted by bitter-girl.com at 9:46 AM on April 4, 2007