DEVTRENCH: Web Development from the Front Lines

Alright, I’m back for part three of this action packed WordPress to MODx Migration mania. In part one I showed you how to use xPDO to connect to the WordPress database and import post content into MODx. In part two I demonstrated how xPDO handles table relationships by importing WordPress comments into MODx. In this part of the WordPress to MODx migration I’m going to show you how to create and assign templates, migrate categories and postmeta data.

Before we start, I’m glad to say that I’ve created an account on GitHub and have personally switched from SVN to Git. This came about because of MODx’s switch from SVN to Git, and I’m glad that they did, because I’ve found that I like Git a lot more than SVN. That said, the code for this script is now hosted on GitHub at http://github.com/devtrench/WordPress-to-MODx. Since this code is still for developers only, there’s no official release in the downloads section (or on MODx), and I’ll most likely keep it that way until it’s packaged for the masses. However, placing it on GitHub does mark the beta release of this code, so please test it out if you’re doing a WP to MODx conversion. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! If you just want the script you can get it from GitHub. Below and on the following pages, is the continued explanation of how it works for those who are interested.

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In part 1 of this Wordpress to MODx migration I introduced you to xPDO’s schema and model generators and started work on migrating wordpress post and page data into MODx. In this post I’m going to show you how I built the relationships in the wordpress schema file and how I pulled in all of wordpress’s comments and kept the threading in tact. Plus the script has evolved to handle where to store pages vs posts, what to do with versions, keeping child/parent relationships intact, and some basic cleaning up by placing config values in the configuration section.

Schema Relationships

Previously the schema file that xPDO generated was simply a dump of what it found in the database. Relationships have to be built manually and I’ve since done that (as well as getting rid of any tables we don’t need, like plugin tables). I basically followed the wiki on how to make relationships in a schema file and built the relationships based on the table structure and my knowledge of how wordpress works on the database level. Here is the current schema file which is most likely still a work in progress.

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I wrote in my last post that I want to move this blog from WordPress to MODx and so I thought this would be a good real world lesson in using xPDO.  Rather than custom coding a database migration tool using plain old php like I’ve done in the past, I thought it would be cool to see what xPDO could do, how easy it would be, and how robust xPDO is.  I’ve spent 2 hours on the code below and have never used xPDO before, and so far I’m pretty impressed with what xPDO can do. It’s nice to work with a lightweight ORM tool that just does it’s thing without extra framework code to wade through.  I’ve used the Doctrine ORM in Symfony for quite a while and its a bit complex a bloated (do we really need DQL?), so compared to that, I found xPDO faster and easier to learn.

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