Drupal to WordPress Migration

I tried … I REALLY tried, but sometimes breakups are necessary when the relationship becomes too lopsided to save. I have had a Drupal-based website for 8 years and 22 months (as I was reminded when I logged in after months of absence yesterday). However, I have long considered it an abusive relationship that needed to stop for my own good. There is no question that Drupal is an amazing tool, but a tool that makes you work hard to make it work hard. It all became … well … too hard. I have been able to keep things current with “minor” updates (each taking me at least an hour), but I have now thrown in the towel after attempting (numerous times) to make a major upgrade to the most current version. Admittedly, I don’t know enough to know WHY it has been unsuccessful, but I’m 99% sure it has to do with the nearly 9-year-old database. Reading through the support forums, it seems bad things happen to the database when one makes multiple unsuccessful attempts to upgrade. Stuff inevitably gets added / deleted / moved, and while you can (and I did) “revert” back to the saved stable database, little buggers linger to mess stuff up (see … I really don’t know what I’m talking about / doing).

So, while I could make this a very long and sad breakup story, I’ll instead focus on a positive new relationship. Through my frustrated Google searching for Drupal solutions, I re-stumbled on an organization that helps people like me out of bad relationships with their CMS … see http://www.cms2cms.com/ … I have truly no idea how the magic happens, but for $90 (in my case) I was able to migrate my Drupal content into this WordPress installation in less time that it took me to steep my afternoon tea. For all I know, they are horrid evil doers who embed nasty tracking code in your website (although I found no such evidence of this on the interwebs, or so far in my own experience), but man is the process slick. On their website, you type in the URLs of your “leaving” and “moving to” websites, download a wee file that you upload to both sites, pay a “reasonable” (IMHO) migration fee, and *poof* you have a lovely new website with all of your old data and posts migrated in under 5 minutes. I still have some things to tidy up (particularly the attachments to posts that are *there*, but not appearing), but really no different than if I changed a theme in Drupal.

I’m not sure this new home will get me back to regular blogging, but the conditions are far more favorable. Time will tell …