Tag: Migration

How To Migrate Your Blog From Blogger To WordPress

On July 17, 2013

When it comes to designing and hosting a website, many people takes advantage of different Content Management Systems to automate things. Some of them opt for Blogger, while others put their money on WordPress. There are benefits associated with both of these systems – WordPress is quite simple to use, whereas Google owns Blogger, which means you are going to get more SEO benefits by sticking with this CMS.

Another impressive thing about Blogger is that it charges you nothing for using its services. It is therefore a good choice for people who don’t want to pay for web hosting or a domain name. Since it comes from Google, you also get to enjoy a number of free tools as well. Interestingly though, some users who originally start their blogging journey from Blogger often turn to WordPress – they migrate for many different reasons.

Why It Makes Sense to Move to WordPress?

Like Blogger, you don’t have to pay anything for publishing your site using WordPress. The issue is that it requires you to pay some money to buy a domain name and a hosting package. In return, it offers impressive user support and a variety of plug-ins that you cannot find in Blogger. It also offers a number of support features to make it easy to optimize your site for Google and other search engines; in fact, some of the templates are designed to provide you with a highly optimized website/blog. It is mainly due to these benefits that people consider migrating to WordPress.

Migrating in an Easy Way

If you’re not really concerned about maintaining the same design in WordPress, you can easily migrate to this CMS. Just copy the text of your blog posts that you have published on Blogger and save them all on your PC. Once you have saved all the posts, now start your WordPress, open your account, and upload all your posts. The good thing is that you can upload them all at once, but it also makes sense to publish a few of them at a time – this break in uploading posts will make it feel as if you’re uploading new posts.

Migrating with the Help of the WordPress CMS

The first step will be to buy a hosting plan and register with WordPress. Once you have installed the system, you can go ahead with the migration process. For this, you will need to visit the “WordPress Admin Dashboard”. Find a tab called “Tools” and then click “Import”. After this, you will find a list where they will have “Blogger” listed for your convenience. Just select it, authorize the import, and then select the blog you want transferred to WordPress. Click ‘Import’. Sit back and wait for the process to complete.

What’s Next?

In some cases, your blog at Blogger will close after you have migrated to a new CMS, like WordPress. If it doesn’t happen automatically, make sure you do it manually. The biggest disadvantage here would be the loss of any SEO benefits associated with your old Blogger blog – you may have links pointing to your posts that have originally been hosted on Blogger. Now, you have two choices – simply accept it as the cost of moving or get in touch with the linker and ask them to change the link direction. You can convince webmasters to link to your new posts to avoid having a broken link on their website. In case, you have done some article marketing campaign and have articles pointing back to your blog, you may go to the control panel of those article directories and alter the location.

Here, it is worth mentioning that some people think you should not close your originally Blogger blog even after you have migrated to WordPress. They believe it is a better idea to keep it running and use re-directs, which is not correct – it can make things difficult for you to handle. Just forget about broken links – they will probably take a few days, or weeks to disappear from Google search results, but it will definitely happen.

Photo Credit: Flickr/Adriano Gasparri

How To Use WordPress With Your Existing Website?

By The Editorial Team

On July 10, 2013

In Tutorials

With anyone who has been involved with WordPress or seen people working with WordPress in action understands well that it is a very powerful content management system. It may works as complex for some while it may be as simple too, totally depend on the way how you dealt with it. With that in mind, how much desperate you are onto to bring WordPress with your existing website can be decided. There may be only some features of WordPress you are interested in integrating to your site or you like the WordPress as a whole. The following article will help you understand that in either case how you can use WordPress with your existing website.

Step 1: Understanding The Basics

It is important to assume first that you have an existing site at http://example.com. Now, in order to start, better make a sub-directory (a folder) at your site, and say lets it call it as “blog” (even you can use some other name, choice is totally yours here but important is that you must create this sub-category in order to start).

So you now have an empty sub-directory at http://example.com/blog/. Download WordPress and upload all of its files into this new folder, and install WordPress. Also, if you are using a hosting provider say HostGator, they do even offers QuickInstall solution with which you can install WordPress in a single click.

Step 2: Pull The Header And Include The Loop

In order to pull the regular PHP pages into ones which utilize WordPress, you need to add either of the following code snippets at the start of each page.

<?php 
/* Short and sweet */
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>

<?php

/* Short and sweet */

define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);

require('./wp-blog-header.php');

— OR —

<?php
require('/the/path/to/your/wp-blog-header.php');
?>

<?php

require('/the/path/to/your/wp-blog-header.php');

Once you grab the header, it is uttermost important to include The Loop – a PHP code which is required to display posts by WordPress – in your pages to get the advantage of the Template Tags or plugins available.

Photo Credit: Flickr/Adriano Gasparri

How To Move A WordPress Site From One Server To Another?

By The Editorial Team

On July 9, 2013

In Tutorials

There are times comes when you think and feel that it is the time now to move your WordPress site from your current server to new server. You do get confused and even most of the time you got panicked that how it all can be done without a hassle. The answer is simple first don’t panic as it’s a few step process with which you can move your WordPress site from one server to another while over the top you don’t need to reinstall the things. The content management system is flexible enough to handle all such conditions.

Note: The guide written by assuming that your whole website is powered by WordPress and the files are installed in the root of the website. If in case you have hot your website working in a directory like /blog then make modifications as it would be required.

Step 1: Backing Up

The first step you strictly have to follow is to back up whole of your data. This includes backing up your WordPress database along with all the core files, images, plugins and other files on your site.
In order to backing up, there are many of useful backup plugins you can use which helps you securely backup the whole of your data. Plus you can also backup your site using the cPanel although at the end, the choice is completely yours but opting for either way is safe, so you need not to worry about.
In case if you are just moving your WordPress from one server to another but keep the same domain name, then all you require is to edit wp-config.php with your new database/user information and upload everything to your new server.

Step 2: Don’t Require Your Old Blog

In this case, download a copy of the main WordPress files from your old blog to your hard disk and edit wp-config.php as per your new server.
Now, go back to your old blog and go to Administration > Settings > General and change the URL to that of new site.
Once you now login to your server, go to phpmyadmin and export as file and then save your database, followed by uploading the new database and the copy of the WordPress core files with the edited wp-config.php to your new server.
To remember here the time when you save your database, make sure you do keep the old one just in case. That’s it.

Step 3: Require Your Old Blog

This would be the case if you want your old blog as it is on your new server. Doing this is a two process procedure: activating your new blog and restoring your old blog

Activating Your New Blog

First and foremost, download your complete WordPress installation to your local drive and name that folder. Make sure the naming you done would be appropriate to your old blog’s installation.
Download your database.
Now, go back to your old blog, then go to options and change both of the URL’s to that of your new site.
Again download your entire WordPress installation to your local drive. Name the folder with this time to indicate that this is your new blog’s installation.
Download your database once again but also keep the old one for just in case. Upload the database to your new server. The best shot is if you use the same name for database and creating of user with same login credentials on your new server as that of your old server.
While, if in case, you use different database name and/or user, edit wp-config.php in your new blog’s installation folder appropriately.
Upload the NEW blog’s installation folder to your new site and you are done.

Restoring Your Old Blog

On your original server, delete your old blog’s database but only do this if you already have a copy on your local disk which I asked you to do so in the beginning.
Upload your old blog’s installation folder to your original server; overwrite the files which are currently there.
You may also delete the installation folder on the server and simply re-upload the OLD blog’s files.
Upload your old blog’s database from your local computer to the server and you are done.

I strongly hope that the above guide helps you in all way. I will be happier if you share your opinions in the comment box below.

Photo Credit: Flickr/John Fischer

Migrating Your Site From Joomla, Drupal To WordPress Part -2

By The Editorial Team

On June 22, 2013

In Tutorials

The article is a second part in a two-part series of migrating your Joomla / Drupal site to WordPress.

Part 2 – Migrating Your Drupal Website To WordPress

Migrating from Drupal to WordPress, you do find it’s difficult on selection of plugins to choose from to let you simplifying the task. But in actual the whole process requires a lot more work on your part than migrating from other popular content management systems although if you follow the steps, then it would not be that much difficult for you.

If your Drupal site is small in size, then it would not be much a difficult task as it is easier to manually copy and paste the whole of content into WordPress. Remember, make sure you do keep a note of the URLs of each of page and keep the track of all internal links using a spreadsheet. With this article, I tried to put all the points required for migration from Drupal to WordPress.

In order to get started, first create your WordPress installation in the same database in which you have your Drupal installed.
Truncate the data in the WordPress tables and clone the taxonomies of categories you had in Drupal.
Now clone the posts, which involve retrieving of data from all three base drupal tables.
It’s time to fix all the images and files URLs in the posts. Images usually get stores in the upload folder in WordPress while Drupal stores them in its default/files/site folder.
Fix the post URL now as Drupal stores the complete URL while with WordPress, only the last part stores.
Count on relationships in the Drupal tables and store them in the WordPress table.
Follow by this, update the category count and straightforward now migrate all the comments you have in your Drupal site.
Once updated, don’t forget on to define the redirection rules which will forward all requests to the previous URLs of your Drupal posts to the new URLs of your WordPress.

Migrating Your Site From Joomla, Drupal To WordPress Part -1

By The Editorial Team

On June 19, 2013

In Plugins, Tutorials

With the way WordPress moving and with the way people loving it, there is no doubt that WordPress do hold a strong future of content management systems – then whether it would you would be running your current website on either of Joomla or Drupal – somehow, some way you do wish to move your website to WordPress platform. The migration process comes different from CMS to CMS. With this two part series, we are sharing the best WordPress migration tips with you with which you can easily migrate your website – which would be running currently on Joomla and Drupal – to WordPress.

Part 1 – Migrating Your Joomla Website To WordPress

Joomla is a very popular content management system which being used by a lot of people to manage and publish their website. While, Joomla is a good CMS but still not everyone want to stick with it for longer time, especially ever since WordPress comes into existence. Just like others, and since you are on this article, I am sure that you too would be looking out ways by which you do the migration safely. In this – the part 1 of two part series – I will share with you on how you can do the migration of your website from Joomla to WordPress.

Starting with, you need to choose a web host and install WordPress on it. Once you have WordPress installed and running, go to the WordPress admin area and select install new plugin.
Search for FG Joomla To WordPress plugin and once found, install and activate it.
Once done with activating the plugin, go to Tools > Import, you will see a list of import tools available for your WordPress installation. There, click on Joomla FG from the list.
Selecting this means now you have reached the Joomla Importer for WordPress page. Here, you have to provide your Joomla website and database information.
Go to your Joomla website’s administration area – Global Configuration » Server tab – and from there you can get the database settings which you would be required for the purpose. You can also get the database information in configuration.php file in your Joomla website’s root folder.
Once you done with providing database information, scroll to “Behavior.”
In case, if you want to import your Joomla website media files, such as images, video to your WordPress website, then make sure that you have checked Force media import option.
Last, but not the least, finally click on “Import content from Joomla to WordPress” button.
Done by the entire step above, the plugin then will run a script and start importing your content from Joomla to WordPress. The turnaround time will depend totally as per the data you want to transfer.
Now, since you have all your content with you on your WordPress website, it’s time to fix all broken internal links. This you can do by scrolling down to the bottom of the plugin importer page and click on Modify internal link button.

FG Joomla to WordPress – Plugin In Use

Free Features:

migrates Joomla sections as categories
migrates categories as sub-categories
migrates Joomla posts
uploads all the posts media in WP uploads directories (as an option)
uploads external media (as an option)
modifies the post content to keep the media links
resizes images according to the sizes defined in WP
defines the thumbnail to be the first post image
keeps the alt image attribute
modifies the internal links
migrates meta keywords as tags
can import Joomla posts as posts or pages

Premium Features:

migrates authors and other users
SEO: redirects Joomla URLs to the new WordPress URLs
compatible with Joomla 1.0 and Mambo 4.5 and 4.6 (process {mosimages} and {mospagebreak})
migrates Joomla 1.0 static articles as pages
migrates Joomla 2.5+ featured images

More Info | Download

Note: This is first part of two-part series of migrating your Joomla / Drupal website to WordPress. The second part of the series can be found here.