It has become almost standard to see people abandon Drupal and embrace WordPress. WordPress has become the standard for blogging and many websites because of its ease-of-use and thriving online community. There are no immediate predefined Drupal importers or DrupalToWordPress plug-ins available, but you can avoid many of the tricky (yet important) aspects that we will discuss later by running a migration script.

Getting everything to WordPress

Once you have finished the installation of your WordPress site, have a theme ready to go, all you need to do next is move your Drupal content into WordPress, this includes tag, categories, forum, users, comments, pages, posts, so everything really!

The easy part of this is the fact that the core data for tags, categories, posts, and comments can easily be inserted into your WordPress. However, it becomes a little more challenging once we have to deal with those Drupal elements that do not really correspond with anything in a standard WordPress installation.

Remember that Drupal is quite a bit more flexible than WordPress. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Whereas you have many default Drupal extension modules, WordPress relies on countless different plug-ins that all compete with one another.

What you have to pay attention to

There are a number of important challenges to take into consideration when moving your site off Drupal and onto WordPress. By anticipating these ahead of time, chances are that it is going to cut down on inevitable frustration.

Content types and fields – Using the “standard” CCK module, it is easy to create custom types and fields in Drupal. You can migrate these into your WordPress by integrating the field information (assuming you have no plug-in in use) or adding this as post metadata. The first step is going to be to find the values of those custom fields in Drupal. This is going to be a challenge because every type/field information is stored in a different table

URL mapping – When you are cloning Drupal posts, sometimes you are unable to keep the same URL when switching to WordPress. The issue here is that you can define the URL pattern structure at the node level in Drupal. If you notice that this is a problem for you, make sure you have 301 redirections in place to guarantee that search engines and visitors have access to your old Drupal URLs

Forums – Unlike Drupal, WordPress does not have a core forum feature. This means that you need a forum plug-in for WordPress and adapt the database migration based on that forum. Not pleasant to do, but unfortunately it is the only way.

Users and roles – You can set different roles in a Drupal site. Because the WordPress roles are predefined, you have to make sure that the permission for that role in WordPress matches with the Drupal role. Again, a plug-in is necessary to manage extended Drupal profiles.

While there are some challenges when switching from Drupal to WordPress, the good thing is that once it is complete, you are working on a CMS that has far more user support. Because the two are so different, it is unlikely we will find a conversion plug-in any time soon.

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