Migration to ExpressionEngine
July 8, 2008
This article is considered legacy, but remains published because of continued demand.
Last night, I spent a few hours migrating this site from WordPress to ExpressionEngine. I made the decision long ago, perhaps nearly two years back. But I haven't found the time to make it happen until now. Plus, I had a couple of failed starts in the past because the migration process between these two systems isn't exactly simple. Finally, I pushed through and managed to import all posts and comments into EE in one fell swoop. There was some clean-up after that, but it was mostly straightforward. It was certainly easier that attempting to move the WordPress entries to the EE database manually. :)
So now I'm all set here. I'll outline a few items that I did in the process.
- Uploaded ExpressionEngine Core 1.6.4 into a subfolder and ran the install process
- Added "Articles" weblog and custom fields
- Imported posts and comments from WP into weblog entries and comments using mt-import.php
- Switch URL word separator to dash (-)
- Threw some SQL at the database to update the imported records from underscore to dash
- Learned a lesson about importing: switch URL word separator to dash and then import
- Converted the WordPress "theme" into EE templates
- Moved entries that were WP "pages" into EE template (static) pages
- Moved WP files in subfolder and moved EE files into main folder
- Updated all paths in EE to reflect new base path
- Removed index.php from the URL structure (.htaccess)
- Added Rewrite rules to help traffic to old links find the right place in the new URL structure
- Repaired several markup and style issues and performed general cleanup
- Added categories (None were transferred during the import)
- Update nav to use EE template tags for category list
- Added archive template
- Fixed midsection to reflect archive and latest comments
- Updated Gravatar support
- Fixed and tweaked many small items, like <title> structure, pagination, etc.
- Decided to make sure all this works by publishing something
- Published this
If you have any specific questions about the process, let me know. If you are interested in moving your site from WordPress to ExpressionEngine, I think you'll find the search results online now render much better results than in the past.