Migrating from Drupal (4.7) to Wordpress

I helped Katie setup her new blog this weekend and decided that WordPress offers much of what I want out of this blog for a lot less effort than drupal1. I decided it might be worth my time to now while this blog is in it’s infancy to try converting from drupal to WordPress.

The way I start most of my projects is with a plan:

I’m really confident that this will be easy. I don’t even have to worry about comments or anything, since this blog is pretty new, but I can demonstrate how to take care of the.

Discovery

This post details a migration path from drupal to wordpress. Some considerations had to be made since I’m using drupal 4.7.

Implementation

Copy content

I followed most of the instructions, with some alterations from vrypan.net.

I installed WordPress and in mysql ran the following commands:

use wordpress;
delete from wp_categories;
delete from wp_posts;     
delete from wp_post2cat;
delete from wp_comments

I run my drupal site in the same database server, so the data copying was a snap. If you aren’t so fortunate, just copy the relevant drupal tables temporarily your wordpress database.

First we get the drupal categories into WordPress:

USE wordpress;

INSERT INTO 
	wp_categories (cat_ID, cat_name, category_nicename, category_description, category_parent)
SELECT term_data.tid, name, name, description, parent 
FROM drupal.term_data, drupal.term_hierarchy 
WHERE term_data.tid=term_hierarchy.tid;

Again with the posts:

INSERT INTO 
	wp_posts (id, post_date, post_content, post_title, 
	post_excerpt, post_name, post_modified)
SELECT DISTINCT
	n.nid, FROM_UNIXTIME(created), body, n.title, 
	teaser, 
	REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(LOWER(n.title),' ', '_'),'.', '_'),',', '_'),'+', '_'),
	FROM_UNIXTIME(changed) 
FROM drupal.node n, drupal.node_revisions r
WHERE n.vid = r.vid
	AND type='story' OR type='page' ;

And the relation between posts and categories:

INSERT INTO wp_post2cat (post_id,category_id) SELECT nid,tid FROM drupal.term_node ;

And finally comments:

INSERT INTO 
	wp_comments 
	(comment_post_ID, comment_date, comment_content, comment_parent)
SELECT 
	nid, FROM_UNIXTIME(timestamp), 
	concat('',subject, '<br />', comment), thread 
FROM drupal.comments ;

I ended up moving the one static page I had into WordPress’s “pages” section manually.

Since my pages are written in Markdown, I enabled the Markdown for WordPress plugin.

URLs

Now for the real test. I needed to go through each page on my site and see if I could get to it using the same URLs. Since I had only 14 posts, I did this somewhat manually. I used drupal’s built in admin to do this from most popular to least popular. Most URLs worked fine. There were a small number that didn’t for various reasons, I used custom mod_rewrite rules to handle them.

Adjusting Templates

My drupal template was fairly clean and simple. So I adjusted the CSS for the default theme in WordPress until I got what I liked. Very minimal changes had to be made to the actual “HTML.”

Make the switch

Well, time to make the switch. In the WordPress administration, I just had to tell it that it’s now going to be located at spindrop.us. Then I moved my WordPress installation to the spindrop.us web root. It was a snap. Let me know if you have any troubles.


  1. Taxonomy, legible URLs and trackback support all seemed quite difficult to master in Drupal. In Wordpress they appeared to be available standard or with a minor change in the administration panels.
  2. This is a prime reason why URLs should be clean and make sense to the end user, not the programmer of the publishing software.