So this is the first post in the new migrated and merged weblog. At last.
It has proved one more time that a web site start up should be planned carefully lest you’d have couple of busy evenings correcting your strategy in the future.

Problems one should be prepared to when venturing such moves:

• Permalink re-design. Page addressing approaches are very different in Joomla and WordPress.
• Permalink forward setup for each page moved.
• Loss of your design. Joomla look&feel and its themes may be appealing to many (like it was with me couple years ago, when it was “Mambo” yet) and it’s got nice built-in features (some of which may be available as WP plugins, but some may not)

Using the excellent helper script Mambo2Wordpress Import Wizard it’s easy to get rid of Joomla in favour of WordPress if you’ve got only a basic Joomla site.

Everything beyond regular posts (”stories”) will have to be moved some other way. That includes static content, links directory. And even the posts require some level of manual intervention, like categorizing/tagging (thou you probably wanted that anyway if you were deciding to go WP), {mosimage} translations and permalink wording (re-)invention.

The hardest part for me was moving comments. Not that I’ve got lots of them, but I wanted to do the job the “right”, scalable way. So I did SQL export/import with columns remap between the two CMS’s rather than manual copy-and-paste.

And of course I’m missing my meticulously customized theme with OpenSEF and such in the old Joomla-based site. But I just had to move on…

As I sow the migrated site somehow functioning I proceeded to the second part of the quest - merging my preexisting WordPress blog with the newly migrated WP website.

I rightfully thought it’s a piece of cake (just look in the admin panel at the WordPress Import options list and notice the prominence given to Wordpress-to-Wordpress import) and it was to the most part.

The only problem I’ve discovered so far was a couple of columns in the wp_comments table missing from the WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) XML file. Those columns were for user agent used for commenting and comments subscription state (the Subscribe to comments plugin).

So if you really don’t want to loose that kind of data keep in mind that you’ll have to SELECT/UPDATE as needed.

The most fun part of the whole process was setting up a bunch of redirects (Redirect 301) for all the pages I had within the two websites.

For Joomla those redirects had to be made individually for each and every page address - first because the automated script Mambo2Wordpress didn’t take into account the OpenSEF data but rather created WordPress permalinks (post_name’s) out from the post_title’s and second because when I was creating “friendly URL’s” at the time of writing the stories in Joomla I didn’t think about possible move to WordPress - I really liked the capability to use CaPiTaLs as well as _underscores_ freely in URLs so I took that “advantage” in OpenSEF (which turned to be a BIG disadvantage during the move).

Creating a list of redirects (.htaccess) for WordPress when moving the whole blog is a no-brainer
Redirect 301 / http://new.address/

Even if your WordPress’ permalink structure started to seem boring to you - no problem, you may easily update it along the move with the Permalink Redirect plugin which now supports changing permalink structure along with its usual function of adding trailing slash to canonize site’s URLs. Just make sure you update the permalink structure at the source blog, so that the destination will be free of redirect clutter.

To facilitate creating the list of RewriteRule’s (in certain cases RedirectMatch will do just fine) for Joomla articles it may be convenient to copy the full list of requested pages from awstats year’s statistics page for joomla site and pipe it through Perl one-liner:
perl -ne 'm%^(/\S*)% && print "$1\t\n"'
…then work from it.

All in all such migration+merger is doable but pretty daunting so attempt to avoid it by mapping out your site ahead, even before the launch.



Categories: Ongoing Projects, Tips & tricks, UNIX & Computing, boring.
Published on Thursday, July 26th, 2007
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