FairFieldMirror Switches To WordPress

Comments

1. Daniel Bachhuber (1 comments.) says:

   10/14/2009 at 7:32 pm

   Thanks for the post, Jeff. I’m the Executive Director of CoPress and it’s great to have our partner’s projects get the press they deserve. I’d like to clarify on one point, however. We did actually migrate their old College Publisher database to WordPress with a custom conversion script that we maintain. The issue isn’t so much with what the script does in the conversion process, but rather how the data is delivered from College Publisher. There are sometimes significant inconsistencies in the archives, which also vary from archive to archive, that we can’t always handle with our conversion script. I haven’t talked with Joseph about this specifically, but I imagine the time was spent cleaning up some of the data after we converted and imported their old archives.

   Also, if you’re interested in switches with large databases, CM Life was over 38,000+ records. That was a significant undertaking with a few tricks we had to invent.
   • Jeff Chandler (171 comments.) says:

     10/15/2009 at 7:23 pm

     I’ve spoken with Joseph via email and I would love to have you and him join me on an episode of WordPress Weekly in the near future. Let me know if you’re interested or have been in contact with Joseph regarding this opportunity.
     • Daniel Bachhuber (1 comments.) says:

       10/15/2009 at 7:28 pm

       Sure, I’d be happy to
       • Jeff Chandler (171 comments.) says:

         10/15/2009 at 7:29 pm

         Ok, Joseph is in the process of getting me his schedule and I say we collaborate via email from here on to try and nail down a date to do the show. This will be a good one!
2. Chris says:

   10/14/2009 at 7:51 pm

   Joe Cefoli is my homeskillet.
3. dotpro (3 comments.) says:

   10/15/2009 at 1:29 am

   Great story.

   WordPress truly is a dynamic and modern CMS platform. I recently converted all of my sites from joomla+article manager CMSes to wordpress… one site alone had 16,000+ articles (between joomla and article manager by interactivetools.com). The switch was painful, had to think about if it should be done, lost a lot of backlinks but it was worth it.
   • Jeff Chandler (171 comments.) says:

     10/15/2009 at 7:24 pm

     Wow, sounds like even more of an undertaking than what FairFieldMirror went through. How much of the conversion process was automated and how much of it did you have to do by hand?
     • dotpro (3 comments.) says:

       10/15/2009 at 9:38 pm

       Jeff,

       Thanks. Article Manager allowed me to create XML files… so, it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. I just imported the XML files (20 of them) into wordpress (an awesome feature). It imported author (still had to create the author username manually though, used a mass user creation script for wp), article content, etc and I didn’t really care about pictures as there weren’t that many to begin with.

       On the other hand, for joomla, there is a great script out there that allowed you to import articles from each joomla section and/or category into wordpress category. Majority of my articles were in article manager.

       I would say most of the work was done by the XML feature both in article manager and wordpress, manaul work was just importing them one by one.
4. Dana@Online Knowledge (3 comments.) says:

   10/15/2009 at 4:23 am

   This story tell me how powerful is WordPress engine. I am glad that i make a right choice to choose wordpress as my blog engine.
5. Amy (1 comments.) says:

   10/15/2009 at 8:24 am

   After reading this I switched to WordPress as well – best choice I’ve ever made online
6. Anand (2 comments.) says:

   10/17/2009 at 7:48 am

   This is a great story of how open source projects can really be successful.