Symphony.

I’m looking for quotes on migrating cmscritic.com to the Symphony platform. It is currently running on self hosted wordpress and I think the main importing/exporting of posts and such I can manage myself, not sure on the comments and how I would get those migrated but thoughts would be appreciated.

Would need the existing theme or something similar migrated as well.

Overall, we don’t have much to spend but thought I’d try to get an idea. Perhaps even exchanging some advertising to cut down the costs?

I think the main importing/exporting of posts and such I can manage myself, not sure on the comments and how I would get those migrated but thoughts would be appreciated.

If you are able to export your entries and comments as XML you can import them in your new Symphony install using the XML importer.

Wordpress has an XML output feature under the Backup menu option.

The xml it outputs is quite complicated though and will take some reading to ‘get it’, it certainly did me…

I did this for my own sites recently (in both directions). If you’re still looking for someone to help with this, send an email to me - hi@thecocoabots.com.

I’d need to get an idea of the size of the migration before I would have any idea how long it would take.

If you successfully import Wordpress XML via the importer, a tutorial on your methods would be greatly appreciated on this site. There are a few people who want to do this, but it is an arduous task.

I also find the xml importer to be way over my head. An easier method or tutorial would be appreciated.

@thatcriticguy, many people on here would agree that I have had a terrible time with the importer, but once you get your head round the xPath part of it, and make sure the exact data to load is available, it’s not actually that bad.

I break imports down into chunks and have the ‘Update entries’ checkbox checked, but still, tutorials for Wordpress imports would be great, there’s a lot of xml from Wordpress…

I ported my blog from WordPress to Symphony earlier this year. I wrote PHP code to extract the data directly from the WP database and store it in the Symphony database. That was relatively easy. The hard part then was converting WP’s HTML to Symphony’s XHTML.

I usually stick tidy or something similar in the middle of the XML Importer conversion - this ensures that what comes through the other side is nice and validly tasty :) Saves a fair bit of time on the post checking - but let’s be honest, all migrations have that nasty step after you’ve moved 30,000 pages where you need to check enough of them to be sure nothing went majorly wrong.

XML Importer is a freaking great extension :)

If you are moving a blog or site from Wordpress, I found this WP Plugin, Modify paragraph formatting plugin “PS Disable Auto Formatting”, to be invaluable. Activate the plugin, save all your entries in Wordpress (so it will rewrite the <p> and <br/> back in your entries), and then go to the Tools section of Wordpress and export your XML.

Then use the amazing XML Importer to bring it into Symphony.

That’s a useful hint Brian, I might modify it to output markdown for my ingestion process…

Cool find!