Converting a Blog From Drupal to Wordpress
My friend Damian and I have just been moving DSLRBlog from Drupal 5 to WordPress 2 using instructions from D’Arcy Norman.
While Drupal is a fantastic platform, I had problems maintaining it. It was getting me down particularly fighting the torrent of spam being thrown at it. Keeping on top of updates, bug fixes, security patches, yada, was a pain. I am simply not interested in Drupal, whereas I do keep abreast of WordPress news.
The biggest problem we had was I didn’t want to lose rankings through the URL structure change. While WordPress can follow a very flexible URL pattern, the blog in question had changed a lot over the time it had been on Drupal and had a lot of strange URLs.
We fixed this using .htaccess to redirect the old to the new, like so:
Redirect 301 /blog/chris/old-url http://dslrblog.com/new-url
All I need to do now is add my favourite plugins, find a theme to tweak and we should be good to go 
By Chris Garrett. Posted in Development
Is the redirect specified above going to be enough. Do your old URLs map straight onto you new WP based site?
We’ve changed e-commerce systems loads of times and I get the thrill of maintaining all of the old URLs from them all. We try not to drop a single URL. I maintain around a thousand or so. It is quite a pain, but worth it I think.
Each URL has it’s own line in the .htaccess, we exported a list using the MySQL database, there are about 1000 of them
Good idea…I do it manually
Yikes. Okay, you solved what had to be done. I am working on two special redirect plugins for WP because I have 6 sites on Typepad that I need to move WP. There are over 400 posts, and there’s no way I’m going to do this manually.
I faced the same problem when I moved from Blogger to Wordpress.
@Jack – I try to avoid “manually” wherever possible
@raj – Ooh, typepad *shudder*
@Guilherme – I wouldn’t know where to start!
You can start here
It is not a relate of my migration specifically, but is the technique to do it.
Of course, in order to do that I already was hosting blogger on my own domain.
For those who don’t know how it works: you can set up your blogger account to log to your server via FTP and drop the processed .html files there, but you handle your blog via the blogger site.
Fully hosted wordpress is all dynamic, so there are no such things as .html pages, but if you use the same post slug you used on blogger, the rule I show you remove the .html from the address.
A simpler solution could be ending all post slugs to end in .html. (I never tried this, but could work)
very useful post and I bookmarked for future reference
I will surely need it sometime
Wordpress is definitely the better platform for blogging. However, I find myself diving deeper into Drupal depending on the content needs. There seems to be more flexibility with Drupal if website needs to be more than just a blog.
@Guilherme – Useful stuff
@cazare – Good idea
@Billy – Drupal is infinitely useful but probably more than anyone needs for just a blog
1000 redirect in yout .htaccess file doesn’t sound like a good idea. Is Wordpress’s alias system not flexible enough to have kept them?