Professional WordPress: Design and Development, 3rd Edition

11 Migrating to WordPress

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?            

• Planning to move an existing site or content pages to WordPress
• Choosing among the different import options available
• Listing of potential cleanup or manual fine-tuning steps needed to complete a migration
• Using WP-CLI to simplify the process

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/go/wordpress3e on the Download Code tab. The code is in the Chapter 11 download file and individually named according to the filenames noted throughout the chapter.

The bulk of this book extols the virtues of WordPress and we hope it has made you more of a WordPress fan, evangelist, and expert. If you are ready, willing, and able to help WordPress conquer the world, but you are not starting with a clean slate, you will need to migrate existing content into WordPress. Alternatively, if you are adding “Family WordPress expert” to the title of “Family SysAdmin,” you are likely to have a line of friends and family asking you to help them get started. Finally this chapter will also touch on taking a local test site to launch using a special WordPress command line tool.

A variety of reasons exist to move existing content into WordPress:

• You want to move from static, time-invariant content to a narrative style. Rather than publishing “brochureware,” you want to tell a story, and the timeline element of a WordPress site is the best approach.
• You expect comments, and discussion ...