Trusster: From Drupal to WordPress

Posted on September 3rd, 2009 by Jeff

Another day, another updated web site. A client wanted to convert his existing website from drupal 6 to WordPress 2.8.  They wanted to make the switch because Drupal became too unwieldy to configure, manage and to extend. The integrated forums left much to be desired and the lack of a good antispam module meant that they were inundated with so much spam that their signals were lost in the noise.

Trusster reimagined in WordPress

Trusster reimagined in WordPress

The transition was fairly painless. I installed WordPress in a subdomain so I could run both sites side by side during the conversion.  I was able to migrate the posts and users from the original site from a command shell.

Next, I recreated the custom blocks as text widgets; that gave me all the sidebar functionality necessary. Widget Logic allowed me to easily hide and show widgets based on the page being displayed. SABRE prevents bots from joining the site while  Aksimet kills any spam that gets through. Drain Hole allows my client to control access to downloads. Dagon Design’s Import Users, Email Users, New User Email Setup, and bbPress integration plugins round out the user management side of the site. If you didn’t guess from the last plugin there, we used bbPress for the new forums.

Check it out, and let me know what you think.

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