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Month: February 2015

WordPress to Drupal : First steps

 

I plan to use Drupal to re-organize this large blog: flowingmotion.jojordan.org.  This post lists the beginning steps.  Each step is quite large and if you are completely new to web development, you will need to look up and complete each step as a mini-project.

  1. Make a development environment on my laptop.  Set up WAMP.
  2. Set up Drush so that I download Drupal and its modules more easily.
  3. Set up a clean database in WAMP / PHPMyAdmin.
  4. Download the latest version of Drupal 7 and unpack it into folder in c:/wamp/www/myblog
  5. Go to my browser and install Drupal: “localhost/myblog”
  6. Use the command line to use Drush : “cd c:/wamp/www/myblog”
  7. Use Drush to download and enable the modules for “pretty url”
    1. drush dl token pathauto
    2. drush en -y token pathauto
  8. Chose a theme and use Drush to download/upload it.  I used Stanford’s Open Framework and downloaded it manually to /myblog/sites/all/themes.
  9. Logged in, set the time to UK and set up the date format.
  10. Under Appearance, set the Open Framework to the default
  11. Use Drush to install the modules needed for WordPress_Migrate (see above for the commands): migrate ctools features  media media_youtube migrate_extras
  12.  As of today’s date though this will change, do not download WordPress_migrate with drush. Go to its webpage and install the latest development version
  13. Go to Add Content and select Migrate. Look for the Worpress link
  14. Follow the instructions – all of the them!
  15. I  tried to retained my WordPress urls but that did not work and the aliases are borked too.  As it was not straightforward finding this workflow, I will leave this for now and worry about sorting my comment.

These are the basic steps for importing WordPress content into Drupal. It is not perfect but as this is a one off import, it is satisfactory.

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WordPress to Drupal

Here begins my migration from WordPress to Drupal.

Why move from WordPress to Drupal?

I don’t advise anyone to move from WordPress to Drupal unless they have a strong reason.  WordPress is friendly and you will be functional and confident in few months.

Drupal is overly complicated, bloated and very badly documented.

So why move to Drupal?

Drupal is designed for complicated sites.  The Views facility, that is, it’s query function is very powerful.

This blog, Flowingmotion.jojordan.org has grown very big.  I don’t even remember everything i have written.   And I would like to find out.  I would like to delete what is no longer of any use. I would like to organize what is still valuable. And I would like to rewrite what could benefit from rewriting.]

The benefits of migrating from WordPress to Drupal

I intend to download the content of this WordPress blog onto a development site on my laptop and reorganize its content.

I will use a Drupal module to do a rough-and-ready migration.   Then I will start allocating posts to “Books”.   That is, I will set up a “Book” and cross-reference them to existing posts.  Once I have done that, I will be able to make a plan for each Book or collection.

I have also chosen a simple base them to think ahead to a “responsive” theme. I want people to be able to read my “Books” on their mobiles. When I rewrite the posts, I will take the smaller screen estate into account and chunk and structure the posts so that people can follow a complicated idea more easily.

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