Moving In Wordpress, Moving Out Graffiti!

The last few days have been interesting. I have been using Graffiti 1.2 as my blog engine for quite a while now and the time has come to move over to a better platform. Graffiti is a great engine but Telligent has dropped support for it and it’s basically dead. The product itself has been released to the world and is now open source. For those interested there is a new version available and this can be found here: http://graffiticms.codeplex.com/.

Due to this I decided to move to Wordpress as my blog engine. Initially I thought this wouldn’t be that hard but its been a reasonable challenge to get things working the way I would like. The platform I am running is Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 X64 with IIS 7.5. Basically this is what I did to get my blog up and running with Wordpress.

1. Install MySQL, configure this for remote connections and add users and a schema. I also installed the MySQL Workbench which is a great tool for managing your databases.
2. Install FastCGI as a role service for IIS 7.5. This is required if you want to use PHP.
3. Install PHP. The default options will automatically add the handler mapping for you to IIS.
4. Install Wordpress.

While these tasks sounds reasonably easy, they are time consuming. Once Wordpress was up and running I had to migrate my posts across from Graffiti. This was a much harder task. I had a heads up start by using a tool I found here: http://www.sagara.net/post/… This exporter allows you to connect to your Graffiti database and export out to MoveableType’s import format. I tweaked this utility a little to work with my environment and settings I required. The exporter runs well and you will get out a .txt file with your posts. Using Wordpress’s import tools you can easily upload this .txt file and import the posts in. We then hit a little problem. The importer does not import your existing tags across. This is a problem and a fix can be found here: http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/… 

Once posts and tags are in the database things start to look quite a bit better. It was then onto sorting out my redirections. Graffiti uses a different URL structure so I had to tweak things. I used the URL Rewrite plug-in for IIS 7.5 that allowed me to redirect any requests over to PHP. I then used a custom permalink within Wordpress. I also used this plug-in to handle existing permalinks out there and hand off .aspx pages to PHP.

So far things are running well. There are a few things I have to clean up in the backend but Wordpress is running very well and I am pleased with the performance. I have also been able to merge my archives blog into this one blog so that was really good. I have a number of new ideas for my blog so I will be working to add these in over the next few weeks.

For those wanting more detail on how to move across from Graffiti, drop me a email and I can give you a few tips and tricks to save time.