One of our clients is a university department, and they were recently required to switch by university mandate from their ExpressionEngine site to a Wordpress-powered site. They wanted to keep all their content intact.
I’ll reserve judgement on the wisdom of the switch; I just know that it’s something you might need to do some day, and here’s what we found useful as we did this export. I was switching from EE 2.5 to Wordpress 3.4, so keep in mind things may have changed by the time you read this.
First of all, these resources were amazing, and I recommend them:
How to Import an ExpressionEngine Blog into Wordpress (most recent, and best)
Moving from ExpressionEngine to WordPress in 64 easy steps
These two pages were interesting, but not as relevant or as up-to-date:
Export data from Expressionengine to wordpress
and EE’s own, minimalist, Export Entries wiki post
Secondly, set up a template group called “admin” and a template called “export”. Set the template to be XML. Then use this file: wordpress_export__EXAMPLE.xml as the template. If you have comments, you will also need to create a template called admin/comment_export. The code for that is in the same file, near the bottom.
Thirdly, if you can keep your images and any other referenced files in the same file structure after the migration, you’ll be much happier. If you can’t, you’ll have to do a quick search and replace for any image paths and change them to match your new location for those files. You can also do this with PHP in your template, but it’s very memory intensive, because you’re
Lastly, if you get confused, a good solution is to take one post that you’ve created in Wordpress, or imported successfully from ExpressionEngine, export it to XML, and compare that file to the file you’re generating from ExpressionEngine. This will highlight anything new to your installation that you can add to your export, or anything that doesn’t match what WP is expecting.
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