WordCamp Miami 2015 was a full weekend for the AlphaWeb founder. After BuddyCamp on Friday, May 29, Brian Messenlehner's co-author Jason Coleman presented their book, Building Web Apps with WordPress, on Saturday, May 30. Then Brian took the stage with a talk that would become one of his signature topics: Move All the Things to WordPress! He posted his slides publicly on May 31.
Why migrations
By 2015, WordPress was growing fast, and more and more organizations running on other systems wanted to move. Some were on open source platforms like Drupal or Joomla. Others were on proprietary content management systems or hosted builders. A few had sites so old that nobody knew how they were built anymore.
The talk covered how to approach each of those situations:
- Well structured databases, where the job is mapping tables and fields to WordPress posts, terms, users and metadata.
- Exports in CSV, XML, JSON or HTML, where the job is cleaning and importing in repeatable batches.
- No access at all, where the only path is to carefully collect content from the live site and rebuild it in WordPress.
The lessons that hold up
The tools have changed since 2015, but the principles from this session are the same ones we follow today:
- Inventory everything first. Every content type, every URL, every file, every user.
- Write import scripts you can run again and again. The first run is never the last.
- Preserve dates, authors and relationships so the new site tells the same story as the old one.
- Map every old URL to a new one and put 301 redirects in place to protect search rankings.
- Test on staging until the counts match, then cut over with a plan to roll back.
From conference talk to core service
Migrations to WordPress are now one of AlphaWeb's main services. Our migration work spans government sites, school districts, enterprise brands and nonprofits, and the source platforms range from open source systems to proprietary enterprise and hosted school platforms. The talk in Miami was an early public version of that playbook, and Brian gave a version of it again at WordCamp Toronto the following year.
A weekend for the book
Seeing Jason present Building Web Apps with WordPress the day before was a highlight. A year after its release, the book was still drawing a crowd, which said a lot about how many developers wanted to use WordPress for more than blogs.
If you are planning a move to WordPress and worried about losing content, links or rankings, AlphaWeb has been doing this, and teaching it, for a long time.
At a glance
- Event: WordCamp Miami 2015
- Dates: BuddyCamp on May 29, main program on May 30 and 31, 2015
- Brian's session: Move All the Things to WordPress!, slides shared May 31
- Related session: Building Web Apps with WordPress, presented by Jason Coleman on May 30
Related: BuddyCamp Miami 2015: Move All the Things to BuddyPress, Consolidating Your Web Platforms: How We Plan a WordPress Migration, WordCamp Toronto 2016: A Business Panel and Moving Everything to WordPress and Protecting SEO During a WordPress Migration: Redirects, Content Mapping and Metadata.
Have a question about this event or a project like the ones mentioned here? Reach out to AlphaWeb and Brian will be glad to talk it through. We are always happy to compare notes on WordPress, mobile apps and migrations.
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