The first step in the migration away from plone and to something elese is the selection of an appropriate content management system (CMS). This is Part 1 of a series of blog posts.

PHP and MYSQL

Plone requires a dedicated root or virtual server which in turn requires a certain amount of maintenance. As I wanted to move from a dedicated root server to some simpler pure webhosting package – and thus save the time needed for the routine sysadmin tasks – the first objective was  a system which can easily be run on any standard webhosting package. Today, this primarily means php and mysql

The Big Three

In the PHP and MYSQL world three content management system account for more than 80 % of the marketshare, namely WordPress, Joomla and Drupal where

• WordPress is primarily a CMS for blogging with an ever growing support for static pages,
• Joomla is a user friendly, highly extensible software for blogging and for static pages,
• Drupal is a highly customizable and complex multi-user capable swiss army knife.

What do I need? A basic single-user blogging software with some support for legacy and new static pages. Nothing fancy. For me, therfore, all three satisfy my requirements.All three CMS offer an extensible platform which is powerfull enough (WordPress), quite capable (Joomly) or totally overengineeringed (Drupal) for my requirements.

Import Capabilities are Important

Starting with a bunch of legacy data from my plone site – more on this latter – import capabilities for an automatic import of said data into the new solution are very important. What I needed was some programming interface to programmatically create pages or posts and upload data.

• For Drupal there is the Services API. Documentation is poor, though. Concise examples are not available.
• For Joomla there is an extensions that provides an XML-RPC blogging API but no supoort for pages and other types of content.
• WordPress in contrast offers support for remote access via XML-RPC. All major aspects can be controlled via this API. Even better, there is also the python-wordpress-xmlrpc python library which is actively maintained and well documented.

Conclusion

All three CMS are more than adequate for my needs. Testing each CMS briefly WordPress presented itself as the CMS with the best UI, the least cumbersome handling and the smallest amount of needed customization. Add this to the unparalleled import capabilities via the XML-RPC API and WordPress a clear winner.

Next Steps

With the CMS selected the next steps of the migration from plone to wordpress are:

• Exporting data from plone
• Importing data into wordpress
• and wrapping everything up.