Massive Wordpress database migration

Question

This is a doozy of a question...

I am developing a new wordpress website to replace my client's massively sized blog (tens of thousands of pages). Their existing blog is built on a custom PERL blogging platform from 1992...so as you can imagine, it needs updating.

My job is to find the BEST possible way to migrate all of their existing data into a format that wordpress can understand.

The new theme is very advanced, and this job is very advanced as well. After searching for specialists, I can't seem to find anyone who specialized in this field. What would you do in this situation? Thanks!

Answer 1

I've done this before, it's not that hard. I approached it as a wordpress plugin. First get the plugin to connect to the old database and get it to pull the information you need. Then you can use native wordpress function to insert new users, posts, comments, etc.

I did it line by line, which isn't the most efficient approach, but it is the easiest. I used an AJAX front-end to display the conversion status and repeatedly call the converter back-end, as the actual migration took up to several hours.

If the site can't be shut down for that long while you migrate the database, you could either look at doing a proper bulk export/import, or lock old topics and migrate those over first.

My converter was for an old PHP nuke site, and due to the fact that we were using WP-United, I didn't have to worry too much about user credentials and comments. However, the code might help you get started: http://www.wp-united.com/releases/php-nuke-converter

Answer 2

I have done a couple of these Wordpress migrations. The theme you're using in Wordpress is really not that big a deal, most likely. Themes in Wordpress don't ordinarily impact the database structure.

The Wordpress side is easy, it's in MySQL in most cases. The place to start for you would be to determine how the data in the PERL blog is stored. If it's a custom blog solution, there probably isn't a script you can find to do the migration. Hopefully, it's in a data form that will allow you to do a data dump in a format MySQL will allow you to import using something like phpMyAdmin (a popular GUI for MySQL). At that point, you can create a MySQL statement to match up the relevant fields in your old data with those in MySQL. If you're not comfortable doing it and want an expert, the thing to do is find out how the PERL blog stores it's data and find someone who is familiar with both that format and MySQL.