Moved to WordPress
You may have spotted that the blog has been given a spring clean? In actual fact I have ported the site from Community Server 2008.5 SP2 to WordPress 2.9.2. I would love to have said it was an easy job, but alas it was not…
Firstly my reasons for this bold move…
- Community Server was way too restrictive on content that could be embedded, as a consequence some videos previously posted can now be viewed in-line.
- I’m not a .NET developer and WordPress offers a ridiculous amount of plug-ins (8,965 as I type)
- GoDaddy offers me 200mb of SQL and 1gb of mySQL (I was running low on SQL space, I know I should have thought of that earlier)
So for those that are contemplating a similar move, a few tips:
- To export, I used a BlogML plug-in for Community Server, this facilitated an export for posts, comments etc. (I had to re-add all images manually, this was painful)
- To import, I used a BlogML plug-in for WordPress, this brought the content in and created a text file containing my permalinks.
- To ensure redirections were working i.e. /post.aspx to /post, I used the “Redirection” plug-in for WordPress. (source information for this was generated via the previous step)
The key to limiting site downtime was my test environment, I used Virtual PC to run a copy of Windows 2008 Server off an external USB drive. Running this on an external drive allowed me to run the VM on any machine running Windows 7 VPC – (with the recent lift on desktop CPU VT requirements there is no excuse to pull out the VMware card!) Another great find was Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer, this performed a single-click install of WordPress – an excellent time saver!
It has been a long day…
