Thread

Hi there,

my EE License is rather old - i’ve already renewed it by january or something but i unfortunately had no use for it until now. I’m running a WP based blog for some time using the Simple Tagging Plugin for Tags (besides several others but’s not that important). I’d like to switch to EE now to have more flexibility in extending my site from a simple blog into a multi area site with downloads, some more blogs probably a gallery and a forum later.

EE seems to be made for cases like this - luckily 😉

Some questions tinkle my brain now and i would be happty to get them answered:

- can i split my EE Site into subdomains like gallery.domain.tld and forums.domain.tld and also have blogs on the subs like blog1.domain.tld blog2.domain.tld?

- can i easily export my posts from wordpress and keep categories and tags? I’m sure the URLs won’t keep but that’s not a big factor. There must be a google sitemaps plugin around that helps to get the new URLs easily into the index, isn’t it?

- How about spam protection with EE. Are comment and also trackback-functions protected against spam? Probably any akismet-stuff around or something like the math-comment spam (text-captcha)?

- Does EE have a pingback feature also or only trackbacks? I miss those pingbacks in nearly every software other than wordpress.

That’s all for now - my biggest worries so far. EE itself looks like much work to do but that’s not a big deal. Switching the old content into the new engine will most probably be much more work.

Thanks for you help,
Frank

Hello, Helmi!

Hi there,

- can i split my EE Site into subdomains like gallery.domain.tld and forums.domain.tld and also have blogs on the subs like blog1.domain.tld blog2.domain.tld?

Yes, you certainly can.  See these docs for the forum.  You would want to look into the Multiple Site Manager for handling all of ths.

- can i easily export my posts from wordpress and keep categories and tags? I’m sure the URLs won’t keep but that’s not a big factor. There must be a google sitemaps plugin around that helps to get the new URLs easily into the index, isn’t it?

I honestly do not know how easy that is from Wordpress.  We have a wiki article on Migrating to EE.  There are also some items not added there included the CSVGrab and FeedGrab plugins, which allow you to add entries based off either CSV files or RSS - which give even more options for migration.

- How about spam protection with EE. Are comment and also trackback-functions protected against spam? Probably any akismet-stuff around or something like the math-comment spam (text-captcha)?

There is an Akisment module + extension combo, built by Lodewijk, there is not a math module that I know of, but there is a CAPTCHA solution for adding question/answer type CAPTCHAs,  You can find that in our Extensions forum.

- Does EE have a pingback feature also or only trackbacks? I miss those pingbacks in nearly every software other than wordpress.

There is no pingback feature, and I never used Pingback so am not quite sure how it works, but it may be possible to do with an extension or extension/module combination - but you’d have to roll that yourself, as I don’t know of one that exists.

That’s all for now - my biggest worries so far. EE itself looks like much work to do but that’s not a big deal. Switching the old content into the new engine will most probably be much more work.

Post back if you have more questions!

Hi Lisa,

thanks for the reply.

There is no pingback feature, and I never used Pingback so am not quite sure how it works

Pingpack is working very similar to trackback. It tries to “ping” all linked pages in your post by checking there meta-tags for information regarding that. I think there should be a special plugin to make it work but probably you’re right and it can be done by a combination of other stuff. I’m sure anyone could say something regarding that if he/she got it working.

Migrating from WordPress sounds like a bit of pain - also it doesn’t look like it has happened too often. I couldn’t find much around the forums so far.

Think i have to try a lot and do some test installation to see if it’s worth diving deep into EEs structure which looks _very_ different to others i already know.

Best,
Frank

Oh, plenty of people have migrated successfully from Wordpress, please remember that forums (not just ours) tend to be a place folks go when they are having problems, not to report success.  =)

I’m a success story for migrating from WP to EE.  One thing that helped tremendously when I made the move a couple of years ago was a handy little WP plugin that exported entries and their comments to a properly formatted MT file.  I don’t know if WP offers exporting options since I haven’t looked at it since I made the move.

P.S. I’m pretty sure this is the plugin I used, but its fairly old now.

of course you’re right, Lisa, about that success and problem part 😉

@CrimsonDawn: Thanks for letting me now - Lisa has just posted a script above that is from march ‘07 - think i’ll do some testing on my local machine with that and see how it goes. I also have to look into db structure of EE to see how it does Tagging - probably there will be a chance to import non-standard tags also but i don’t tink so.

Does anyone know if there’s any easy way to do bulk tagging of posts after importing?

If you use solspace.com’s tagging module, it can harvest tags based off categories or custom fields, I believe.

I’ve tried all 3 tools listed in the wiki for the Wordpress switch, but all failed :(

Any other options I could do? I don’t really want to move 4 years of blogging to EE on a post by post base, or throw it away completely.

A quickie Google search for “Wordpress Movable Type Export” returned this WP plugin that was updated back in July of this year: Wordpress To Movable Type Export.

I haven’t tested it since I haven’t looked at WP in a couple of years, but something that recent probably should work.  Let me know if it helps!

Chris

Thanks. Tried this. It did add two members to my blog, but not any posts.

Maybe it has to do with the following:

<div id=‘error’>
        WordPress database error: [Table 'bookieb_blog.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]

        select category_id from wp_post2cat where post_id = 22;
        </div>——-

Going to try it out the ‘difficult’ way. Just downloaded MT, going to import it there, and then trying to import it in EE.

Sorry Insane (getting to call someone Insane without a dirty look is great fun, by the way 😊)... It looks like WP 2.3 broke the export script because they changed how categories are handled.  I’ll keep digging around if you can’t get it working straight through MT…

I’ve got it working by first importing all the data in MT then exporting it to use in EE.

Thanks anyway 😊