thirdbIT

The Stuart Johnston posting Automatic migration from typo to WordPress got us part of the way from Typo to Wordpress, but a number of things have changed in Typo since those scripts were written, so it took some jiggering to get working. We were at Typo 4.1, and the database schema was somewhat different.

This is what I did to export the data from Typo:

bash$ mysqldump -u username -p name_of_typo_db articles_tags tags categorizations categories contents feedback > dumpster.sql

Then I imported that data into the Wordpress database (just did “source dumpster.sql” within mysql), then sourced typo41_migrate.sql, which is modified from Johnston’s typo_to_wordpress_with_utw.sql script.

Comments welcome on the utility of my process.

So we’ve moved the site over to Wordpress from Typo. We experimented with two rails-based blogging engines, Typo and Mephisto (which seems more popular in the rails world right now), but Wordpress is a mature and widely adopted platform and in the end it made more sense to us to go with it. We’d rather not be solving software problems others have solved a million times over. (Which is why we also won’t be producing a to-do-list app any time soon. Online to-do lists! A billion to choose from, and yet somehow, none of them make my work get done. Though actually, I just bought a copy of the PDF book Flexible Rails, since I’ve decided to pick up AS3/Flex in my spare time, and the tutorial project in the book is, of course, an online to-do list.)

I’ve been delaying posting this notice because I keep looking for a blog post I read a month ago which convinced me I ought to think about Wordpress, as it was an explanation for a rails blog running on WP, and a damn good explanation at that. But I can’t for the life of me find it again. I found several other people who moved to WP after experimenting with the rails blogging engines, but not the post I remember. The explanation was, basically: right tool for right job. WP is good tool for blogging. No need to reinvent. Etc. Except the post was more eloquent than my restatement. Oh well. Lost in the ether.

Also, Max had to run a cron job doing some voodoo the details of which I forget to keep the Typo instance in good shape. Wordpress is faster, and, we hope, more stable. (No, I am not making a comment about the stability and speed of Ruby on Rails in general, just a statement about one instance of one app on one host. YMMV.)

Anyway, Max has a script for migrating the database from Typo to WP, and he’ll post it any second now.