Moving From Drupal 6.x To WordPress 3

After almost two years of running this site on Drupal 6, I finally came to the realization in late may it was time to move it back to WordPress and Thesis.

What brought me to this decision was more than just the upkeep associated with running a simple blog on Drupal…

It also had to do with the complexity of module interdependence with drupal, which on more than one occasion caused numerous problems.

One of the biggest reasons this site used Drupal in the beginning was the power you had over your content. But, now I feel wordpress has more than caught up.

While I had moved quite a few sites from wordpress to drupal … there’s a module for that. Moving in the other direction seemed like more of a challenge.

Yet, a quick search on the internet turned up this excellent post Convert – Import A Drupal 6 Based Website To WordPress v2.7

Setting up a temporary site via MAMP was the first step, followed by downloading the 2.7 version of WordPress from the release archive.

Following the instructions the data was converted in no time at all. Everything appeared to be there and still intact. The next step was to download and update to the latest version of WordPress 3.01.

Followed by installing the Thesis for WordPress theme, a little fine tuning in under MAMP and then it was time to move it over to the live server.

Creating a new database on the server with phpmyadmin seemed like the easier thing to do. Then using phpmyadmin to backup and download the data from MAMP followed by importing it into the newly created database.

There is one gotcha when moving the database from MAMP to your live server and that is the website url. Fixing this is fairly easy, on the live server enter your database via phpmyadmin and click on your wp_options in the first row of data you’ll see.

phpymadmin-1.gif

Change localhost to your website url.

There is still one other area that has to be changed as well on the second page of the wp_options.

phpymadmin-2.gif

Change it to your website url.

Now that the data was on the server it was fairly easy to move all the files over to the server after deleting the drupal files.

Once you’ve moved all the WordPress files and folders – set the permissions edit your wordpress wp-config.php to point to your new database.

You’ll also need to copy the hidden file .httaccess to your wordpress folder.

Of course you could simply install WordPress…

And then import the database from MAMP.

I did find one odd thing in the move and that was with the comments not being in the correct order. Mainly it seemed tied to replys to comments.

Other than that, the move from Drupal 6 to WordPress was just as smooth as moving from WordPress to Drupal.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • manny Sep 28, 2010 @ 8:04

    yes, i figured it would be simpler for a blog to be on wordpress

    if you want anything more, drupal is the best.

    anyway, i’ve had a share of security problems with wordpress and sql injections :/

    for it’s popularity its a big target. And sadly sometimes the devs also slack a bit on the fixes..

    drupal’s high focus on security and bigger “tech savvy” user base lets me sleep well at night 🙂

    while d6 is great, hopefully once a full release of d7 will make some tasks a bit easier

    • Glenn Burks Sep 29, 2010 @ 7:34

      Hi Manny,

      You’re right for most it is much simpler to use wordpress for blogging. Yet, I believe wordpress with a few plugins has made significant progress towards becoming a true content management system.

      One of the issues I’ve seen and experienced with Drupal is there has become to much interdependence with modules. And, most people will use the modules versus doing it manually.

      With this interdependence from all outwards appearance the module maintainers don’t talk to each other to ensure that when they do roll out an update it doesn’t totally break a site. I’ve had to install several security updates from one module maintainer that totally screwed the sites up “White Screen Of Death” That took days to weeks to fix and the advice was to roll back to the previous release after they had announced to the world their was a security issue.

      Then you have the bloatware with Drupal both in the size of the files needed to make it run and within the database itself. For example the same site on drupal 70mb database versus 4mb on wordpress with essentially the same functions.

      I suppose the key with either platform is not to stray to far from the core…

      As for Drupal 7 I see it having slower rollout compared to 5 or 6 mainly due to the server requirements required to host it. And, I’m not sure many hosting providers will upgrade their server software to run one piece of software. Maybe this will be addressed before Drupal 7 is final.

      Ok, with all that said Drupal still is the best platform provided you have the time and patience to perform the constant maintenance and upkeep of the modules. Now if we had the many of the essential modules rolled into core it could reduce a lot of headaches.

  • ross Dec 5, 2010 @ 18:02

    You make it sound easy moving drupal to wordpress.

    Wish I never went to drupal.

    Drupal sucks!