I used WordPress Import, a pretty powerful tool which is still in development mode. On the surface it's a straightforward process of installing the module, uploading your WordPress .wxr file and then mapping out which posts are 'owned' by which users (aka authors). It then transfers both posts and comments associated with it.

It becomes a hell of a lot more complicated though when your .wxr file is 17mb. like mine, and I have nearly a hundred different subscribers and authors.

The actual migration is extremely resource intensive, so to upload the big file and handle the job you need to tweak these things: One, php.ini to allow for a large upload (the default is only 2mb.), and Two, Drupal's settings.php to allow for both a longer session time and to for more RAM to do the job, otherwise you will receive errors midstream like I did, and only transfer, say, half your posts or an increment instead of all.

To be specific, I changed the line at php.ini from this:

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files.
upload_max_filesize = 2M

to this:

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files.
upload_max_filesize = 64M

Then you'll need to add these two lines to your settings.php:

ini_set('memory_limit', '128M');
ini_set('max_execution_time', 0);

Naturally you'll need to restart the webserver and make sure everything, including your other sites hosted on it, is fine. If you're doing this on a live server (meaning there are people reading the website), you need to do it quickly, then return the settings to their original immediately.

It so happened I bought a new domain so I'll be practicing on that one first before finally jumping onto MomEx.

Another issue that's been licked is the 'Clean URLs' problem. As I use Lighttpd, using .htaccess rules is out of the question, but I managed to find a good tutorial here, and another one that deals with imagecache issues, an important feature to handle images, using Lighttpd here.

There's only one more issue I need to fix before finally getting it all together.

MomEx's pageviews are counted by a WordPress Plugin called Clickcounter, which as the name suggest, registers a 'click' everytime someone views a page and displays it on the page plus stores it in the db.

A transfer to Drupal will negate all the registered hits! Drupal has its own click counter equivalent I'm sure, and I could probably tweak it to start counting where it left off, but that would require some MySQL magic which I'll have to investigate.

I know it sounds a little vain to want to keep all those registered hits but hey, we worked for those, some of which have gone up to the thousands. It'd be a pity to just lose it all.

When I do get that fixed there's the issue of finally migrating the site while it's online. That means I'd have to take it down for a a day or two just to make sure everything works. I can probably start on it in the morning and if I don't get it working, use the backups and go back to the old site in the evening, then start again the next day. The documentation I've read never mentioned these, as they all assumed you'd be migrating to a different domain. Migrating from WordPress to Drupal using the same domain is something new, so I plan to document it.

As with most daunting techie tasks I'm usually overwhelmed at the start but I eventually get over my wussiness and fix it, usually realizing it wasn't all that hard as I thought it was. In other words, I'm confident, and let's face it, getting something to work when a minute ago it seemed impossible feels GREEEAAAAT.

I'm excited about the fancy stuff I can implement once I get it on Drupal for sure, but the tremendous geekiness of it all is partly why I'm doing it as well I think.

Asides: I wanna show posts (or post titles, or post titles with excerpts) from specific categories on the sidebar. I have done this with limited success on BallEx on a category I called 'PBA Notes' (ftg. news fresh from the PBA), but unfortunately WordPress counting mechanism counts these posts as part of the posts that it should display on the front page, so everytime I post to the PBA Notes category, it removes a post from the index. It's not a terribly difficult issue and is 'resolved' somewhat by merely posting more (which I should be doing anyway), but it's kept me stumped for too long a while already, and prevents me from putting even more categories on the sidebar. At the moment the setting on BallEx for 'Options > Reading > Blog Pages show at most:" is set at 30.

As I mentioned on this post, the best Aside Plugin seems to be Katesgasis' Sideblog, but it has unfortunately not been since 2006.

Limited User Info: A lot of other WP users out there wanna do this as well. I'd like to put more relevant fields for users, such as address, mobile numbers and so on. Drupal users know this is very easy with CCK + Views. I haven't visited this issue for a while though, so there may have been developments.

Postie: Postie is a plugin that allows you to publish posts via email. While WP hanoles that natively using (the very simple) wp-mail, Postie allows great flexibility such as category, author, subject, comments closed or comments open, and even set a delay from 1 day to 1 minute. It's terrific if you are, say, posting from the road, or like me, which needs to publish multiple posts to multiple blogs at any given time. It also allows for an automated system that will allow me to post rss feeds or emails from mailing list subscriptions. In other words, I don't have to login each time. Instead, I just send an email. It's wonderful.

It also has not been updated since 2005. Recent comments on the Postie page are mostly requests for updates and pledges of donations, but no go. I am unsure if Drupal has a direct solution to this problem, but for some reason I am confident I can either find one or hack one in.

EventCalendar RSS: For some reason the RSS feeds for the EventCalendar category (I named rather unimaginatively as 'events') RSS feed does not work, inspite of using the instructions here. Meanwhile, I've managed to get all RSS feeds for all categories (and all my blogs) to work properly, so in other words, I'm stumped yet again. This is frustrating as I really wanna do fancy things with my Events Feed - something that's been on my todo list for.. months I think.

Updating: Finally this is an issue that has to do more with blogging software per se rather than WP itself. I read an interview once of BoingBoing.net's owner saying that we shouldn't be afraid to update specific posts as necessary, even if they've been posted already (as opposed to making a whole new post, especially if the updates are merely incremental). The solution is to edit the post and write 'UPDATE:' or something like that, underneath. This isn't very elegant.

I wanna look for a better solution for situations such as those. The dates and permalinks to posts that have been updated remain same, so on the surface, there is no indication that it has been updated. Once a post has been updated and re-updated, it's RSS feeds, I believe, still shoot off to RSS readers, but they look like the same post (unless the subscriber of course, investigates to check if there's something new). Otherwise if they just look at the title and excerpt, it looks the same. There must be a better way.

Drupal things I can do in addition to resolving above issues:

A much better Shopping Cart: I've been bleeding for a better shopping cart than the handmade one I have. I am currently testing Drupal's Ubercart.

Forum: Drupal's simple forum is way better looking than phpbb. PhpBB, from which I trace my programming roots, is great, no doubt about it. But it also doesn't look very good imho, and aesthetics is important whilst dealing with my target audience (girls and moms). Besides, if I use Drupal's Forum, it can integrate with other services like the blogs, and can be turned into a service that I really wanna try (which shall remain secret because I don't want anyone preempting me).

In summary I basically wanna take my blogs to the next level, and convert them into full fledged, gloves are off, firing on all cylinders, WEBSITES. Featuring community abilities, membership, relevant user info, public and (membership only) private information and so on.

The blog ability will always be its main draw. Great Writing and Content is what makes really good terrific blogs in the first place. People love to read, learn and be entertained, and that's what blogs deliver. But once they're 'there', I wanna make them do other things as well, and WP falls short of that because that's not what it was designed for.

I think I'll do MomEx first. It's gone from being number 1 in its category at PhilTopBLogs to number 8, so it needs more help than the others.