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Website conversion

Those who know me knows that I am not a web-programmer. I don’t think I am compatible with PHP, HTML, XML, AJAX, and all the other web technologies out there. So when I need to do something with my domain I tend to rely heavily on open source software designed so that I have to write a minimum of code. The past months I have used Drupal for my homepage. It has worked okay, but lately I had grown a bit tired of it - it was slow, and it seemed impossible to get it to do exactly what I needed. Furthermore I couldn’t upgrade it to a more recent and secure version without crashing the entire webserver, so a new solution was needed.

Granted, Drupal is a big content management system and is not designed to run a small homepage. Yes, I am an idiot when it comes to web technologies - so what. Fortunately a good colleague suggested WordPress for my website, so this saturday I have spent an incalculable number of hours trying to convert the blog entries and pages from Drupal to WordPress.

Whatever happened to compatible technologies..? If there is an easy way to convert data from one CMS to another it has eluded me. I had to do it by hand (export from the MySql database to a local file, use a text editor to edit the INSERT-statements and extract the HTML, copy-paste into the new system, and repeat…), but now it is complete (I think). The only regret I have is that I lost the comments for the blog entries, but that is a small price to pay.

So now I can lean back and enjoy the fruits of my hard labour. And hope that I will not need to upgrade my website again… ever!