WordPress to Drupal: Close Enough

I think the current incarnation of my Drupal presentation is close enough. It would be nice to have the tabs for the articles (forum topics) be below the logo graphic but I can live with them above the graphic. I now need to figure out how to deal with 1) getting my existing blog content into the Drupal incarnation and 2) how to continue to do development on my internal box while retaining all existing content on the production server.

Getting the blog data into Drupal may be challenge. After doing lots of Google searches for a tool to automate the process, I have come to the conclusion that such a general tool probably doesn't exist and, for that matter, cannot exist. The problem is that WordPress has a linear view of posting with each new posting sequentially following the previous postings. That's kind of the whole idea of a blog. Drupal, the way I want to use it, has a hierarchical tree-like view of forum postings and comments.

That is, there are several topic areas and several topics within each topic area. Each topic has associated comments and each comment can be a node from which additional discussions spring. That is, Drupal's tree-like structure can have lots of branches.

One thought I had is to create a "node editor" module for Drupal that would allow a user to re-assign a node to any compatible location within Drupal's comment tree. This would mean I could turn Drupal's generic blog feature back on, come up with a quick way to slurp in my blog, comments and all, and then use the node editor to re-assign blog postings and comments as I see fit.

We'll see on that one. I don't have that many blog postings so it may be worth it to just copy and paste from my WordPress blog to Drupal.

The other problem is to come up with a way to continue to develop my site concept on my development machine and then transfer the updated database to the production server to make it available to users. As one posting wryly observed, Drupal doesn't have a nice clear distinction between a web site's content and it's presentation structure. This sort of makes sense since content should drive the presentation. Unfortunately, this means it will be tricky coming up with which tables are strictly content, which ones are strictly structure and how to handle any others.

This one isn't immediately critical so it may have to wait. On the other hand, it sounds like something a lot of people could use.

Cheers,
Dave