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It's been a while since my last blog entry and so much has changed! I went from being fully employed to fully immersed in scaling up my business for the long term. I am strengthening connections and building upon experience gained in the technological landscape. That landscape continually evolves and it's a challenge to keep up!
As a business person, one has to decide which niche(s) to specialize in as being the jack-of-all-trades just isn't possible anymore. For programming languages, I had decided to broaden my skill set and have even considered moving away from Delphi at one point. But when clients ask if you've worked with a certain product or how you're going to accomplish a certain task, you suddenly realize how important the experience you already have is and you start thinking of ways to leverage that. Sure, you can teach yourself a new language--and you should constantly be doing that--but you also have to make sure the bills are paid!
So when I recently added SSL to my WordPress blog and saw images not showing up and subsequently spent hours hunting down solutions, adjusting links, trying plugins, and getting marginal success, I stopped and evaluated the situation from a business perspective and made a decision to scrap it. The reason? All of my other sites are in Drupal and trying to learn another technology well enough to fix anything just isn't in my best interest. There are a lot of highly skilled WordPress people around and working on content-rich web sites is not really the focus of my business. I know enough about WordPress to talk about it, I've tried it and like it, but my expertise with Drupal is much greater and I have a much deeper investment there.
From WordPress to Drupal
Now certainly, this has been done before, right? Yes, and there are Drupal modules to import content from a WordPress export. However, there are some gotchas (aren't there always?). Most of the Drupal world is encouraged to use Drupal 8, which has been out for quite awhile now. I'm still on Drupal 7 because the servers provided by the web hosting company where my sites reside have not yet been upgraded to the latest version of PHP or MySQL. Drupal 7 is still supported and very solid, but development has stopped on some of the modules. Of course, the WordPress import module is one of them that is getting left behind.
With nothing to lose, I installed it on my new blog site and ran the import. After a few tweaks to the XML file being imported and some adjustments in the module's PHP code, I was able to get all the blog entries and comments ported over. A few adjustments to the selected theme and you're now reading from the new and improved blog, Coding in Delphi and Beyond!