Migrating from WordPress to Drupal 8

Overview

Last weekend I came up short with things to do and with a Drupal 8 release right around the corner I decided to get on with moving my blog across from WordPress. TLDR; It went well :)

Migrate API

Pretty old news at this point for most but Drupal 8 now has Migrate in core. Outside of cores needs for an upgrade path there is an easy to use API for migrating to Drupal from any platform. You could even use it to move between two non-Drupal platforms if you so wanted.

WordPress to Drupal

The Wordpress Migrate module has yet to be upgraded for Drupal 8 although I believe it's coming. However that module depends on parsing the WordPress XML export format and for me, it's much easier to just query the WordPress database directly so I went ahead and wrote some WordPress MySQL sources.

Currently the source classes support Posts, Tags and Comments plus the related url aliases. In total there are 5 migrations.

Custom Reference Fields

On my WordPress blog I was using categories and tags and I wanted to consolidate into a single tags field. There are issues to support node/user reference and i'm sure D7's entityreference will come in the near future too, however, because we're preserving the legacy WordPress ids it made implementing the reference stuff trivial, see applyCustomTagsFieldMapping()

Theme

I'm a developer with very little design sense so don't criticise too hard. I came up with the theme for this blog myself, mainly with bits of inspiration from around the place and a few bootstrap classes.

Spam Comments

Within hours of publishing my new blog I became un-indated with SPAM. Thanks to @kimb0oo for pointing me to the PreviousNext port of Recaptcha

Drupal VM

I wanted to try something new for my local development environment so i've been test driving the Drupal VM so when I came to deploying the this site to a new server I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy geerlingguy had made it to deploy a replicable environment to a remove server. Thanks Jeff!

Future

I'm working on packaging this blog into an install profile. My plan is to have a 1 click migration from WordPress with a simple and clean theme on Drupal 8. It will be focused at developers who care less about the design and more about the simplicity of blogging.