This is a copy-and-paste from Dotclear 2 to Drupal 5 on my personal weblog.

As far as I know, this is the very first article on how to move from Dotclear 2 to Drupal. I wrote the first Dotclear vs Wordpress article some months ago, now this is time for the first Dotclear 2 to Drupal one (there is already a Dotclear 1 to Drupal converter).

I’ll try to stay concise. For this reason, I won’t explain everything—just tell me if you’d like something to be explained.

Good to know before

First, this is a two-step migration:

  1. Dotclear → WordPress
  2. WordPress → Drupal

Second, you must install WordPress on the same server as Drupal. There is no such limitation with Dotclear, since we will work with a flat export file. This is because the WordPress to Drupal converter only allows direct access.

Third, the whole operation may take more than three hours. Oh, and at least for me, tags have not survived the migration from Dotclear to WordPress (I’m not sure they would survive from WordPress to Drupal neither)

What you need to download

Dotclear to WordPress

  1. [Dotclear] Start with Dotclear 2 beta6. That may work with other versions, but better safe than sorry.
  2. [WordPress] Install WordPress 2.2. That may work with other versions, but better safe than sorry.
  3. [WordPress] Extract dc2wp. Inside it, pick up flatimport.php, that you will put at /wp-admin/import and throw the rest away.
  4. [WordPress] If you used tags with Dotclear:
    1. install the Simple Tagging plugin at /wp-content/plugins. Don’t forget to activate it (in the WordPress administrative panel, at Plugins).
    2. put all the files in the wordpress 2.1 template files for default theme (kubrick) sub-directory in wp-content/themes/default. Three files have to be overwritten. If you don’t want to lose them, just rename there before replacement.

    WordPress 2.3 won’t require these steps, since tags will come bundled with it.

  5. [Dotclear] Close comments and trackbacks. This is in order to ensure than no new data will enter your blog while you’re moving it.
  6. [Dotclear] Export the whole blog or whole content (I suggest the latter, but you may have reasons—like being hosted on Gandiblog—to choose the former. I never tried exporting only one blog, notify me of any problem with this). I will henceforth consider you exported the whole content. You will get a blog-backup.txt file.
  7. [WordPress] Upload (FTP) this file to /wp-content/uploads. This folder must have permission 777 (all permissions)
  8. [WordPress] /Manage/Import. Choose Dotclear flat import. Press the Import button. Depending on the size of your blog, it may take a lot of time. If it timeouts, press the Update button once you’re back at the import plugin’s homepage.

That shall be done. Shall be.

Just in case it doesn’t work for you: more information in English and even more in French.

WordPress to Drupal

  1. [Drupal] Install Drupal 5.1. At the time of writing, Drupal 6 is not code-freezed yet. Tell me how it behaves.
  2. [Drupal] Install wp2drupal. Give permissions 777 on the folder. Remove the extra lines after the final ?> in wp2drupal/migrate.php
  3. [Drupal] Copy wp-config.php from your WordPress install to /modules/wp2drupal. This is a convenience: That will save you entering the configuration data for WordPress.
  4. [Drupal] Now, this is really experimental. It seems one file needs to be patched. Here is the patch (and the discussion. I patched the file manually, but if you have some diff tools, you could do it automatically. Follow the instructions on the /admin/wp2drupal/. You might experience a timeout. Just reload, it should restart from where it stopped. Continue following the instructions.

Wouah! This is done! You migrated from Dotclear to Drupal! Čestitam!

Check it out! (temporary location, I’m pretty sure a lot of thing are not there, starting with tags)

Feedbacks greatly appreciated.

What doesn’t work

  • tags (well, not sure: they’re are in the topics. They have been merged with the categories, which is not that great)
  • thin unbreakable space (required for French typography)
  • permalinks of course (mine are based on ID)
  • a lot of function have disappeared (number of posts and comments, programming publication…)
  • certainly much more