I am not sure if I am going to make the jump from WordPress to Drupal with bavatuesdays just yet, but I have been following Darcy Norman’s progress with Drupal quite closely over the past six months, and I am pretty sure I should be playing more seriously with Drupal these days. I have set up developmental installs of both Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5 beta locally to get my feet wet with the various themes, modules (plugins), and overall administration of this CMS. The backend of the Drupal 5 beta goes a long way towards simplifying the administration with a wordpress dashboard of sorts. There are a lot of great features in Drupal, and I will try to document the modules I have been playing with during this experimental period.
Nonetheless, this post is simply to let anyone who is interested in the possibility of converting from WordPress to Drupal know that there is an awesome module called wp2drupal developed by Borek Bernard. This module migrates your WordPress 1.5/2.0x database (including posts, pages, categories and comments) to Drupal 4.7x quite simply. The trick is that you will need to be sure that both your WordPress and Drupal installs are running in a PHP5 environment. Other than that, backup your Drupal database if you are not starting from scratch and you’re good to go. The wp2drupal module takes you through the process step by step -an install wizard of sorts. If you are concerned about images, videos, etc, the way I dealt with this was to transfer the folder with my videos, images and audio to the Drupal folder and make the default input format full html. This will prevent most links to images, videos, audio etc. (whether absolute or relative) from breaking immediately. I still have to figure out how to redirect the RSS and a few other internal links, however this is all still on a local server so I can play a bit more until I work through these concerns. Here’s to the Drupal community for making the transfer of data between open source CMSs (at least in one direction) quick and painless.
but jim, i’m going all wordpress crazy now, because of how much good you had to say about it the other week….
maybe when you get to a critical mass in terms of experience with both systems, you can post a little side by side comparison…
/jonathan
Jonathan,
Great to hear from you! Hope you’re doing well in beautiful Victoria! Never fear, I will always bleed WordPress. In fact, the testing with Drupal does not necessarily signal a switch from WordPress, but an examination of a more sophisticated CMS application for the museum class, particularly for permissions, multi-user blogging, hosting several sites in one CMS, etc. That being said, this blog works fine with WordPress and I really don’t have too much more I can do with this space that Drupal would prove essential. What are you thinking about using the blog for? Where is your WordPress install? -I would love to see it.
One of the misgivings I have had about Drupal are the modules (plugins). I think WordPress’s plugin community is far superior to that of Drupal’s -although my knowledge of the enire landscape of Drupal modules is limited so I may be speaking out of turn. Nonetheless, many folks I think are top notch daily celebrate the powers of Drupal, so I feel it would be remiss if I didn’t give it a serious testdrive sometime soon.
In the end, however, WordPress will always be my true love. In fact, I was planning to post a list of the ten best WordPress plugins I have come across over the past 2 years to respark the relationship. All this is simply the long winded version of a very simple idea: WordPress is well worth every minute of your time and its ease of use, slick backend and robust community will make it a quite serious contender in the open source CMS wars to come.
To build on my ramblings above, the real genius of this is that you can easily move from WordPress to Drupal if need be. This fact is extremely reassuring for me. All my WordPress content is now highly portable, allowing me to experiment with these tools which makes a potential move from one CMS to another relatively stress free. Moving all my WP content into Drupal without sacrificing months (or even years) of posts, comments and pages is a testament to the phenomenal open source communities surrounding these applications. I would be equally excited if there was a drupal2wp plugin or a wp2typo3 extension or even a wp2theideumRonR cms. 🙂