Moving From Drupal Back To WordPress
March 26, 2009 – 3:01 pm
As i wrote in a previous post, i converted this blog from WordPress to Drupal a couple of months back – to get some experience of working with Drupal. But i never liked Drupal and i rapidly came to the conclusion that it’s really not a good platform for a standalone blog. WordPress beats it hands down on all criteria and i didn’t particularly enjoy having to maintain this blog on the Drupal platform.
I started thinking about converting it back again almost straight away, but i didn’t do it. However, the more i worked with Drupal, the less i wanted to – and thoughts of moving back to WordPress came into my head every time i had to do anything with it. At first it seemed like a pain in the arse, but the more i thought about it the better it seemed – and it would be less of a pain in the arse in the long run than having to keep working with Drupal. The longer i left it the harder it would be – as there would be more blog posts to shift from platform to platform – so, this morning, i decided to bite the bullet and do it.
I did it the same way as i’d done it going in the other direction – manually. I copied and pasted the posts from Drupal into the WordPress editor (as source, so the formatting got copied too) and i set the “published” time and date to what they’d been originally. Then i copied the comments – inputing them as normal comments, but then editing them to change the poster’s name and web site and set the date and time to match the originals.
While i was using Drupal, i got a bit slack with keeping up the URL scheme that i’d been using under WordPress (i’d had WP configured to automatically add a date prefix, but Drupal didn’t do that), so i had to write a few “Redirect permanent” entries to .htaccess to make sure anyone following a Google link would arrive at the right page.
I’d also improved the layout a bit when i converted the template from WP to Drupal – so i had to do the same thing to the old WordPress theme now.
But finally, i’m pleased to say, this blog is back running on WordPress again!
Like i said, i don’t like Drupal much, for several reasons, but this was more about which is the best blogging platform rather than which is the best content management system. I’ve no doubt that Drupal is better for some things than WordPress is, but blogging isn’t one of them.
What i’d missed about WordPress was the excellent editor setup, the really useful statistics that you get with the Statpress plugin, notification of comments (it never worked in Drupal), very easy plugin update – and you can even update the whole system with just a couple of clicks now, too! I missed the nice, user-friendly dashboard and the useful administration bits and pieces that come as standard with WordPress.
Overall, WordPress is just much more pleasant to administer.
WordPress is like a “world-lover”:)
I’ve also moved my blog from Drupal to wordpress, but automatedly with cms2cms.