Thought we’d post our fix to our particular problem since none of the posts we found elsewhere has this fix. Note: I’m not saying this is going to work for you.

We have not updated our wp-config.php since we first installed WordPress. We noticed in 2.8.3 (and probably earlier) that the format and settings in the wp-config.php is different. In our case, we manually took the 2.8.3 version of wp-config-sample.php, entered our specific information for the various keys and DB info from our original wp-config.php. After doing this we saved this to our WP root folder overwriting the old wp-config.php with this file.

Abracadabra! Problem fixed. So, does the automatic upgrade not touch the wp-config.php for changes? Well, apparently not and apparently I am supposed to read the readme.html file included in the WordPress 2.8.3 download. Of course, if you use the automatic upgrade functionality, you don’t see the readme.html file.

In our case, we manually downloaded the release after our WSOD problem started. After figuring out the problem, we saw that the readme.html tells you to do exactly what we ended up doing. Doh! That’s what we get for being IT professionals that fail to read the upgrade instructions before upgrading , which we do with our client solutions, but failed to do for our simple blog.

Hope this helps you. Blessings.

• 10 Useful RSS Tricks and Hacks for WordPress – Smashing magazine puts together a good list of WordPress tips to allow some useful RSS modifications. PHP snippets included.
• wpSEO – WordPress SEO optimization plugin. Interestingly this is a for purchase plugin.
• Top WordPress 2.7 Tips, Hacks, Plugins & Resources – A quick hit list for those new to WordPress 2.7
• WordPress Tutorial: Category Trick for WP 2.7 – Interesting idea for styling posts differently based upon categories. Could be used for site segmentation visually.
• Mastering Your WordPress 2.7 Theme & Admin Area – Good article that may just show you something you didn’t already know about managing WordPress 2.7

Blessings to you.

Here is a copy of the script contents with full attributions remaining from the original script. Again, this scripts seems to work fine from Drupal 5 or 6 importing to WordPress 2.1. Following the import we THEN upgraded WordPress to 2.7.

Download: drupal2wordpress.sql.txt

Hope this helps you.

Blessings.

As most of us are prone to do, we spent about 45 minutes searching through Google for options to perform the upgrade. The most relevant find was this post from darcynorman.com in which a script was available for bringing Drupal blog posts into WordPress post. Not only did the script look like it brought over the posts, but also comments and categories.

While the script was created for Drupal 5, not too much has changed in the standard structure of Drupal nodes for use by this script. Unfortunately the structure of WordPress has in fact changed since the script was written for version 2.1 and we were migrating to 2.7.

All in all, this was not too much of a problem since the WordPress site was brand new with no existing content. We simply recreated the site using WordPress 2.1, ran our Drupal to WordPress sql script and then upgraded WordPress to 2.7. Voila! Not bad.

Here are a few caveats.

1. Categories – The script takes your Drupal Taxonomy and makes the entries Categories in WordPress. In our case, we really needed those as tags rather than categories. A quick update statement “UPDATE wp_term_taxonomy SET taxonomy=’post_tag’;” (Be sure to do this BEFORE you do anything else with your categories or tags on WordPress)
2. Comments – You might want to order the comments selected from Drupal so that the most recent comments are last. Otherwise the WordPress dashboard will show the oldest comments as the most recent.
3. Author – You will need to update the post_author column of the wp_posts table to get a proper mapping to WordPress user. You will want to create the necessary users first before updating the post_author field.
4. URL’s – In WordPress the “slug” is the url alias for the post. Watch out for puntuation in the titles, they won’t work well for you if you are using more SEO friendly formats. In particular we had issues with (-) hyphens, (/) slashes and ({}) curly braces. Where these existed, we needed to remove them from the “slug” for the post.

Now, in order to get the old url’s to redirect from the previous Drupal site to the new WordPress site. Seems to me that a 301 permanent redirect is the proper way to handle this. On our servers we can do that easily in the .htaccess file.

There are two approaches here. (1) Redirect all content in the blog directory or (2) write a query to create individual 301 redirect statements for each blog url and place them in the .htaccess file.

Since our blog has less than 100 entries and the URL’s are similar between the Drupal and WordPress sites, we chose option 1. The reason we chose this was the minimal effort when used in combination with the Smart 404 plugin for WordPress. This plugin works similarly to the Drupal Search 404 module. This worked beautifully for redirecting to the correct blog post from the old URL’s.

So, in our Drupal instance we are also using the pathauto module and had all the blog posts under a /content/[title-raw] alias structure. This made it easy to redirect all content with /content/ in the url to the new blog. We added the following to our .htaccess file on the Drupal site:

# Redirect blog posts to new blog site
Redirect 301 /content/* http://blog.tech4him.com/*

And with that, we were done with a quick and dirty move from Drupal to WordPress.

Now again,

The first and obvious question is “Why did you move it?”. Simple answer. We wanted to. Now that’s not a good enough answer though.

See, we at Tech4him.com use many different and varying technologies in daily work. We work with technologies and vendors like Sage Fund Raising 100, Microsoft, SQL Server .Net Framework, Atlassian Confluence, MySQL, SQL Server Reporting Services, Drupal, PHP, VB.Net, DotNetNuke, Nortel/Norstar, VMWare and many more. Our technology use is driven by our customers needs.

As such, we wanted to take the opportunity to become more familiar with what is arguably the #1 blog application out there, WordPress. Now, please don’t flame us for that statement but the fact is we are seeing an increase in our customers, friends and colleagues using WordPress. So, why not move and begin learning the platform more intimately. For us, learning by using is one of our quickest methods of learning with a good ROI.

We are not abandoning Drupal! We will continue to utilize and expand our use of Drupal as a platform of choice for web site/web application development.

So, I hope you will update your RSS feeds and bookmarks and continue to read along as we continue to implement integrity in the world of technology.

Blessings.