Migrating from Plone to WordPress

Over the last 7 years incunabulum.de was using Plone as CMS of choice. But not anymore. Over the last couple of weeks I migrated the website to WordPress.

Why?

Well, first let me stress that I never encountered any serious problems with my Plone site. Yet, over the last couple of years Plone has become more and more complex with a rapid succession of new technologis, complex xml-based configurations and layers upon layers of abstraction. All this added up to an application stack which is very difficult to understand and maintain. Starting with Plone 3 upgrades have become frustating and error prone. The constant introduction of new technologies are only manageable with continuous learning and with continuous development work. Time which I do not want to invest.

Early this year I finally had a site which was running flawlessly yet which I could not update due to my limited knowledge. At the same time I could not reinstall the site in the current configuration as certain packages where not available any more. This gave me a system which I neither could restore in case of a server crash nor which I could maintain for the future in one way or the other. Therefore, it was time to move on. The results you can see here.

The migration from Plone to WordPress was a four step process, namely:

    1. Selecting WordPress as CMS
    2. Exporting the data from Plone
    3. Importing the data to Worpress
    4. Fixing things
    5. Addon; Redirections in Worpress for Plone URLs

The general migration process will be outlined here including all scripts developed for this purpose.

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