Migrating from Drupal 6 to WordPress

With the announcement that Drupal will soon discontinue support for Drupal 6 and with the difficulty many people face in migrating between major versions of Drupal, I thought it might be useful to share my experience of migrating out of Drupal and into WordPress.

This is something has has been on my mind for a year or more now because I have not built a Drupal site in 5 years and each time I had to do a security update I realised how little I now knew about Drupal and how it works. I had even had a couple of ill-fated attempts to migrate out of Drupal into WordPress over the past year, but each time it was just too hard.

What made the difference this time is a post called https://blondish.net/how-to-convert-drupal-to-wordpress/ which I was referred to when I asked a question about manually migrating post comments. When I realised what was in these scripts, I abandoned what I had already done and started again.

I made a blank development folder [website.dev] and pointed a sub-domain at it [dev.website.com]. I copied the “files” folder from my Drupal website into that folder and unzipped a fresh WordPress install package into it. I made a copy of my Drupal database and I was ready to roll.

I ran the WordPress installer which set up a vanilla site. I then went into PHPmyAdmin and started running the migration scripts provided on the above page. Within an hour, I had all the content, users and comments migrated into WordPress.

There were a few tidy up issues to be done (post types that don’t work, blank slugs) but all round, the greater part of a migration of 350 topics and about 70 authors was done in less than a day.

All I lost in the migration was my forum which had started life in PHPBB and migrated into Drupal Advanced Forum, but the migration out to BuddyPress was just too hard. I’ve migrated the best forum posts into contributed blog posts but I might restart a blank forum and let it grow again.

Currently at https://dev.bikesonshow.com but going live as https://www.bikesonshow.com in a few days.