Two-step conversion for Capitol Hill Blue

[dougthompson]

In December, I converted my hyperlocal news site, Blue Ridge Muse, from Drupal to WordPress and implemented Mehmet's excellent Transcript theme for the site. The conversion went well and we're very happy with the move.

Over the last two weeks, we've attempted a more difficult conversion for our primary political news site, Capitol Hill Blue, using the latest release of Advanced Newspaper.

The first step came with a move from Drupal to WordPress. Drupal 6 has become a resource hog, even on dedicated servers with lots of memory. CHB, which has been online since 1994, consists to two sets of files: The static html used from 1994 until 2004 and the CMS dynamic pages used since then. Our Drupal database contained more than 26,000 articles in 22 categories.

As we did with Blue Ridge Muse, we used Lincoln Hawks' excellent tutorial on CMS Buzz to migrate our Drupal MySQL database to WordPress. We were able to complete the move of 26,000 plus posts and 500,000 plus comments without any real problems and the migration was complete in less than hour.

We also decided to combine some categories and used a WP plug-in to batch move posts from one category another.

Our concern was to save the url structure from Drupal to protect our legacy links. WP's permalink function allows us to duplicate the Drupal SEO links.

After creating custom fields to handle guest author bylines and other content specific to our site we relaunched the site two weeks ago with an interim template based on the Producer series by AntiSocial Media. When I saw Mehmet's updated Advanced Newspaper theme I decided to switch to it.

We ran into a couple of formatting glitches and a problem with page displays using WP Super-Cache but Mehmet responded quickly with a revised theme-functions.php file that fixed all the problem.

I haven't modified the existing theme very much yet. Changed the content container width to accomodate 160 by 600 skyscraper ads, made some minor mods to the headers and footers and tweaked the home page a bit to handle our ads. We will implement the mid-page slider with videos in a couple of weeks.

On the single content pages, I added email and print links and moved the author line to the top for a news-site style by-line and modified the meta information at the end of the post.

Will continue to tweak over the coming weeks but getting the content in place and making sure we protected legacy links was first priority.

Sorry to be so long-winded but I feel this was a major migration and we're proud of the results. Mehmet's great themes made it a lot easier and gave us the look and feel we wanted.

capitolhillblue.com