Content Transfer/Organization
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I am taking over development of the site familytreecounseling.com. My client has an old site he is running in parallel to host content that has not yet transferred over at . I’m fairly new to WordPress and need some direction on how best to transfer and organize the content. From what I’ve been able to learn so far it seems the way to organize it would be to have an ARTICLES page with introductory information and then a page for each category of articles (Abandonment Issues, About Marriage Counseling, etc.). Then all the articles in each category would be on one page and use article titles as links to anchors to the article farther down the page. I considered a page for each article but there are over 300 of them and it didn’t “feel” right to have 300 pages. The main menu would be ARTICLES with submenu items of article categories pointing to the article category pages.
The other issue is transferring the content. The old site runs on a custom CMS built on PHP and MySQL. The new site is on godaddy. Is it possible to export content from the old site to insert into the database on godaddy using PHPMyAdmin or should I just accept that it needs to be an article by article copy and paste?
The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]
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I would make the old Articles into posts. Posts have categories. Categories can have a description. But don’t make a page for each category. Just put them in the menu or in the sidebar with the Categories widget. You don’t need an Articles page unless you just want to call it that, but designate it as your Posts page in Settings > Reading.
Export the old database to a CSV file. There are several plugins that will import from CSV. Edit it as a spreadsheet and name the columns the way whatever plugin you use needs them to be for importing. Make sure to include the category in the CSV.
Edit: 300 articles is not that big. A few months ago, I did one that had 7200 static HTML pages. At least you already have a database.
Hello!
The technique you described would certainly work – so you’re starting from a good conceptual way of thinking about it. Let me offer a few suggestions that would help you take advantage of the strengths of WordPress. WordPress is incredibly flexible and you can use plugins to assist with your migration.
Exporting/Importing
Since your current site has a similar architecture (PHP, MySQL) to WordPress, it is very possible to write a script that could export content from your current platform into WordPress. I would avoid the manual copy/paste routine at all costs. You can either do this directly through phpmyadmin as you’ve suggested, through a custom PHP page, or through a variety of other scripting techniques. I suggest making a copy of your current MySQL database tables so that you are working from a copy rather than the master, just to be safe. Alternatively, you might be able to scan the WordPress universe to find a plugin that would allow you to define the schema of your current site and do the export automatically for you. Sorry I don’t have a specific plugin to recommend.Here is a link to the database schema for WordPress which describes how the back-end is organized for a standard installation. Focus on the wp_posts table which I believe is where you’ll do most of your work. https://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description
Site Design
I would recommend importing each of your current pages as a WordPress “post” with the appropriately denoted category or tag.Then the header menu of each page of your site would be the major categories or tags. By organizing your site this way you can avoid the manual work of using anchors. When you click on the menu the posts will all automatically appear and be sorted from newest to oldest. WordPress has an option for you to customize how many posts appear on the page and whether you want the whole post to appear or just the opening few paragraphs with a “read more” link.
I would rely on WordPress for menu design and content organization – it’s what WordPress does best – and it would get you out of the hassle of manually organizing the content. The menu, posts, and categories/tags are all native to WordPress and very easy to configure through the wp-admin portal once you have your posts imported.
Good luck with your project, it is very doable. I would be happy to answer any more specific questions you may have. Best wishes!
Kyle
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