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

[Anca@anca.tv]

Hi  Haluk,

You are better off learning about the structure of the WordPress database, 
and importing your posts directly through SQL rather than messing w/ 
files and XML.

The best way I've found to do this is to create a few sample posts w/ the 
categories you anticipate using, and then looking at the following:

wp_posts
wp_postmeta
wp_terms
wp_term_taxonomy
wp_term_relationships

Feel free to email me off-list if you want more guidance about this.

Cheers,

Anca.

----- 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?