Drupal to WordPress migration

Posted on October 2, 2010

Updated: 8/19/2013 – 9seeds does not offer Drupal to WordPress conversion as a stand-alone service. If you need to convert from one CMS to another, we suggest you check out https://9seeds.com/cms2cms

A client came to us this week with a problem; he had a Drupal site with over 1000 articles that he wanted to convert to WordPress. So we headed to Google for some help. There are several tutorials out there on how to migrate Drupal content to a WordPress site, but many of them are really outdated. After kicking the tires on a few, this post by Mike Smullin seemed to be the best jumping off point.

Mike is right up front in his instructions with the fact that you’ll need to do a bit of tweaking to his set of instructions to get it to work for your setup. After a few failed attempts, we came up with an updated set of instructions. We’ve included the updated version along with notes about changes made.

These instructions are a set of SQL statements. It assumes you have a database named WordPress using ‘wp_’ as the prefix and another database named Drupal.

This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway; do not move forward without backing up your databases FIRST!

Clear all existing WordPress content

TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_comments;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_links;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_postmeta;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_posts;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_term_relationships;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_term_taxonomy;
TRUNCATE TABLE wordpress.wp_terms;

Create Categories

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_terms (term_id, `name`, slug, term_group)
SELECT
 d.tid, d.name, REPLACE(LOWER(d.name), ' ', '_'), 0
FROM drupal.term_data d
INNER JOIN drupal.term_hierarchy h
 USING(tid);

Add Taxonomies

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_term_taxonomy (term_id, taxonomy, description, parent)
SELECT
 d.tid `term_id`,
 'category' `taxonomy`,
 d.description `description`,
 h.parent `parent`
FROM drupal.term_data d
INNER JOIN drupal.term_hierarchy h
 USING(tid);

Import posts/pages
We added ‘article’ to the array on the last line to solve an issue with the way Drupal had categorized the posts.

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_posts (id, post_date, post_content, post_title, post_excerpt, post_name, post_modified, post_type, `post_status`)
SELECT DISTINCT
 n.nid `id`,
 FROM_UNIXTIME(n.created) `post_date`,
 r.body `post_content`,
 n.title `post_title`,
 r.teaser `post_excerpt`,
 IF(SUBSTR(a.dst, 11, 1) = '/', SUBSTR(a.dst, 12), a.dst) `post_name`,
 FROM_UNIXTIME(n.changed) `post_modified`,
 n.type `post_type`,
 IF(n.status = 1, 'publish', 'private') `post_status`
FROM drupal.node n
INNER JOIN drupal.node_revisions r
 USING(vid)
LEFT OUTER JOIN drupal.url_alias a
 ON a.src = CONCAT('node/', n.nid)
WHERE n.type IN ('post', 'page', 'article');

Turn articles in to posts
This will turn the ‘articles’ from the previous step in to ‘posts’ in WordPress.

update wordpress.wp_posts set post_type='post' where post_type='article';

Add post to category relationships

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_term_relationships (object_id, term_taxonomy_id)
SELECT nid, tid FROM drupal.term_node;

Update category count

UPDATE wordpress.wp_term_taxonomy tt
SET `count` = (
 SELECT COUNT(tr.object_id)
 FROM wordpress.wp_term_relationships tr
 WHERE tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id);

Import comments

INSERT INTO wordpress.wp_comments (comment_post_ID, comment_date, comment_content, comment_parent, comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_url, comment_approved)
SELECT nid, FROM_UNIXTIME(timestamp), comment, thread, name, mail, homepage, status FROM drupal.comments;

Update comment counts
After fighting with the original syntax, I added the ‘use wordpress’ step to get around it.

use wordpress;
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_count` = (SELECT COUNT(`comment_post_id`) FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `wp_posts`.`id` = `wp_comments`.`comment_post_id`);

Fix breaks in post content

UPDATE wordpress.wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '', '');

Fix images in post content

UPDATE wordpress.wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '"/files/', '"/wp-content/uploads/');

If your posts have any images you’ll need to move them from your ./files directory to the ./wp-content/uploads directory. The final step above should take care of fixing any image calls in your pages and posts, but you still may need to manually update them if you are having issues.

Download a copy/paste friendly version of the Drupal to WordPress instructions here.

if you have any questions, leave us a comment below.