Migrating from College Publisher to WordPress
Another two great milestones over the weekend for student newspapers moving from College Publisher to WordPress. William P. Davis of The Maine Campus published an epic tome on how he migrated their CP 4 archives to WordPress MU:
The database they gave us contained almost 12,000 entries and was much to big to be handled by a program like Excel or even Access. I’m telling you right now: don’t even try. What you should do is dump the entire CSV into a MySQL database. I found the easiest way to do it was with Navicat MySQL. They offer a free trial. If you have problems, make sure you have enabled database access for your IP address. The easiest way to drop data in is to convert the CSV to an Excel file and then it will go right in using Navicat. Otherwise you might have serious problems with special characters and such. Also, I had a problem with a few spam entries (from where, I wonder?) that broke the database, but I took those out in Excel.
If manual steps aren’t your thing, then the CP Import plugin released by John Luetke could be the ticket. If you convert your College Publisher export files from CSV to XLS, it will import each entry into WordPress through the WordPress API. He reported that it took about 30 minutes to import about 50 MB of pure text for The Marquette Tribune‘s coming website. It will also reportedly add your related media as galleries attached to a post. CoPress is currently converting databases with a Python script but, if it turns out to work well, this might compel us to switch.
The one thing I’d be wary about with the Tribune’s plugin is that every person who writes is added as a user. With our database, that would have resulted in several thousand users most likely. I instead added every user in a custom field, and only the staff for each year get an account. Definitely a good option for smaller papers who might though.
Good point. I think John has plans to continue developing it, so that could be an option that the plugin offers in the near future. There is value in my opinion, however, in keeping the author data as users, and it might be worthwhile to just build a plugin to hide “inactive” users.
True. One of the really nice thing would be being able to search old authors.
Also, how does CoPress handle images? I’m writing a custom plugin to handle images for The Campus that uses the WP upload feature.
What would actually be best is a plugin that would show the most used users and have an ajax search for all the rest of them.
You might want to check out Co-Authors, a plugin that Mo Jangda improved. I believe it does the AJAX search that you’re looking for. Re: handling images, I’d have to defer to Miles on that but I believe our script embeds them within the body content when it’s processing the archives. It’s functional, although my personal opinion is that we should lean on custom fields a bit more and attach media to a post.
Wow, the improved co-authors plugin looks great.
I don’t want to put the images right in the post, and for new images I’m attaching them to the post and calling them with get_the_image, but it doesn’t work as well as I’d like, so I was thinking of creating a plugin that will automatically put the images in custom fields.
@Will Davis
You’re right, the number of accounts that can be created by CP Import canget quite large. The benefit of using accounts rather than custom fields is that you are easily able to view all the articles written by a given person using WordPress’ author permalinks. Doing the same thing with custom fields would be rather cumbersome.
Ultimately though, as Daniel alluded to, it comes down to your paper’s preference.
Version 1.1, which will be released within the next week or so, will have the option to take either route.