Well, I can proudly say that in less than 24 hours, and not without frustration and a few bouts of spilled beer, I managed to get Your Suspect 100% off of Drupal and off of Network Solutions, and onto the free Wordpress.com system. I was shocked with out few resources there were available to me, so I had to get very creative. Here’s what I did:
- I had to hack the Drupal system.module file to allow for more than 30 items per feed. I upped it to 999.
- I ran a cron job just to be safe.
- Saved my sites RSS feed locally, and verified that all the content was there, sans comments.
- Created a hosted Wordpress.org site with a third party company. I made sure that this hosting company allowed for a) monthly plans with no contract and b) a quick and easy way of getting a hosted Wordpress site going.
- I used the native Wordpress Import feature to import a RSS 2.0 feed. It made it in without any issues, again, no comments.
- Then, I used the native Wordpress Export feature to export all this content as a Wordpress file.
- Here, are Wordpress.org, I imported that file.
- There are still some DNS issues and remnant Feedburner matters that I’m dealing with, but for all intents and purposes, I’m off Drupal, I’m off Network Solutions, and I’m on Wordpress.com.
- I manually updated each blog entry’s category and tags. That sucked, but it was necessary and well worth the effort.
This is a step in the right direction for this blog, easier to manage, more integration with a much larger blogging community, and just a whole lot less frustration.
So for all your rocket scientists out there, that’s how ya do it! Unfortunately, yes, it didn’t include comments, but I can live with that, I didn’t have that many comments to begin with.
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can you tell me how you hacked the drupal rss to enable it to display 999 posts?
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@venzie I actually don’t remember all that well, but I recall there being a config file somewhere that allowed me to simply edit that value. I’m 90% sure I found that info on the drupal support pages, searching for “rss 999″ or something like that. Once I did that, and published the file of course, I think it was pretty much all set. I vaguely recall something else – I’ll try to remember and get back to you. I hope this helps – sorry.
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I just did this. It kind of feels like failing but I upgraded to Drupal 6 and had a rough time getting the content out any other way.
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Ben Saren Reply:
March 9th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
I’m so glad I did it. I now have three different sites running on Wordpress, I’m helping a friend build one, and I’m launching another two more for gits and shiggles! Wordpress (.org) is just awesome. Glad to hear you safely crossed the waters!
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hi ben,
i am assuming that since you switched from drupal to wordpress that you were not happy with drupal. i am in the midst of putting up a blog and am trying to decide between the two. the blog needs to be able to handle plenty of video. any advice/suggestions?? i am not a programmer and cannot understand the intracies of each technology to make an informed decision on my own. so, i need to rely on the advice of people who really know this stuff.
thanks so much for your insight.
max
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Ben Saren Reply:
March 10th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Hi Max,
I highly HIGHLY recommend Wordpress. Drupal is great, but it just can’t hold a candle to Wordpress. My suggesting is that you go to http://www.site5.com, sign up with them, and when you’re up and running, use they’re free Fantastico to install Wordpress. It takes less than 60 seconds! Next thing you know, you’re downloading Wordpress themes, installing add-ons, and doing all sorts of fancy stuff as if you were a programmer! Believe me.
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