I run several content websites based on the Evo Articles Content Management System. The software was great and support was good until 2 years ago the developers trashed the entire thing and closed shop. I don’t know why as the reasoning seemed odd, but I guess it does not matter anymore. The software went Open Source for a little bit to then completely disappear. Things worked Ok and my sites were well established and thriving and so I pushed out what needed to be done one day – migrate to a new and supported platform.
One of my 2009 projects is to migrate the 2 biggest Evo Articles based websites of mine to a new supported software platform. I started looking at Joomla and WordPress and did a few experiments on trying to import the data. Imports worked for both platforms, which is good. However, Joomla’s support for the static URLs would make it impossible to properly redirect the pages one for one. Then I played with the permalinks function in WordPress and discovered how easy it is to get a one for one site structure in place. So, I increased my efforts to migrate the database and made some big progress already. All my content comes over fine and properly formatted – including external links. My first test site looks good content-wise and the project is actually further down the road of progress than I expected. So, WordPress will be my solution for this.
One issue is the post date. Right now I cannot migrate the date between the 2 MySQL database due to different ways how the post date is stored. All dates show up as “0000-00-00 00:00:00” inside the WordPress database after migration. That leaves with few options.
Option #1 is to develop a MySQL query that replaces the 0000-00-00 00:00:00 date with the start time of my website. As I do not use a date-based archive the result would good enough for the site. I could then manually update the last articles and let it go. It’s an Ok option.
Option #2 would be finding a way to migrate the date over programmatically. That would give me a one for one match and would be the best possible solution.
Option #3 would be to manually compare and update the post date for hundreds of articles. Yuck. I could outsource that task to some poor soul in India or some other emerging country though.
So, I am close with the migration I’d say. I also leaned out to some WordPress design service to get a quote for a top notch WordPress design for my 2 websites in this case. I feel it is worth spending some money on these sites as they generate solid income and are due for an overhaul anyway. I am good enough with WordPress SEO and plugins so that the final piece of the migration should not be too hard. I’ll keep you posted on the progress of my migration from Evo Articles to WordPress.
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