[wp-hackers] revamping an huge old site ( written in custom CMS ) into a fresh install WP.

[Doug Stewart]

Why not go the plugin route?

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/import-html-pages/

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Diana K. Cury <dianakac at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Karamente,
> I'm always  interested in such task. I'm not a programmer at all, but even
> so, I tried to do things like convert static files into xml and so on.
>
> I think  you can write a script to extract the db content into a WordPress
> xml?! Most of this CMS are simplier than WordPress xml ;)
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Haluk Karamete"
> <halukkaramete at gmail.com>
> To: <wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com>
> Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2012 7:48 PM
>
> Subject: [wp-hackers] revamping an huge old site ( written in custom CMS )
> into a fresh install WP.
>
>
>> We need to revamp 15 year old high traffic website with 10,000+
>> articles/videos/audios ( where things are stored in different tables ) and
>> in an asp/ms-sql implementation. And we chose WP for the implementation of
>> the new revamped site.
>>
>> Obviously, we don't want to do that manually, that is one post at a time,
>> and since this is a home grown CMS, we do not have a utility to import the
>> current content into WP magically neither. We need to write that utility.
>>
>> Our first goal is to get the 90% of the old data into a demo WP site and
>> iron out the details or worry about the look and feel stuff later.
>>
>> For that, I thought of the following plan but I need to pick your brains
>> before I delve into it - You guys are a lot smarter than me and you can
>> tackle this kind of stuff way better than the plan outlined below.
>>
>>
>> 1- get a premium magazine theme with the demo database/resources. ( I
>> contacted two known vendors and they accepted to give me the demo site
>> resource files and the actual db in the form of an xml )
>>
>> 2- get the demo run on my server and play with it to understand how the
>> demo is put together, the cats, the tags, the posts etc... how they manage
>> the featured posts, how things are laid out, the details etc... so just to
>> get familiar with it.
>>
>> 3- create a bunch of custom mysql tables ( that have nothing to do with
>> the
>> wp tables/structures ) and populate these mysql tables with enough
>> category,tag, post data that the demo site contains
>>
>> 4- start a new instance of a wp with a fresh install on the same server
>>
>> 5- write a php script that taps into the custom mysql tables, read the
>> cat,tag,post data and start executing tons of  wp_insert_term,
>> wp_insert_category and wp_insert_posts one after the other into the fresh
>> install wp that I talked about in step 4.
>>
>> 6- keep fixing the php script until the script is able to create the
>> original demo site programmatically with the click of a button.
>>
>> 7- once step 6 is passed successfully, clear the custom mysql table's data
>> and write another script which taps into our old ms-sql to extract our
>> existing cat/tag/article/media file info to be inserted into the custom
>> mysql table
>>
>> 8- run the script ( of step 5 ). With this time, we should be able to get
>> the demo site back except with our content showing thru.
>>
>> What do you say to this plan?
>>
>> What's a better way to achieve our initial goal than the above approach?
>> Do
>> we hit a road block somewhere along the way with the above approach?
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>
>
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-- 
-Doug