I’ve had similar thoughts about WordPress migrations; because I’m working my way through one just now.

Obviously not the same size as Microsoft, but I’ve had challenges too.

I started by using questionnaires, but somehow I feel I might be asking the wrong questions. This is because I’m still having to do a lot of the discovery myself.

Have you found this to be the case?

Also, what type of questions have you found to work best in a migration scenario? i.e. questions that help to increase the success rate of a migration.

I find that even after painstaking investigation, a lot of tidbits still have to be moved manually (to a degree).

Just as an aside, you mentioned the use of publicly available staging servers.

I think you’re right.

This is essential, because of what you said in reason a:

“your computer is too slow (period)”. Yep. so true.

The problem that I’ve found though is that sometimes the staging server is left accessible to Google.

What then happens is that Google indexes both the staging server, as well as the live server. End result is a problematic “duplicate content” issue.

I think that staging servers should be used, but care should be taken to prevent them from entering Google’s search index. Yoast has a great post that details how this should be done.

Essentially, Google will be asked to crawl the site, but *not* include it it’s search index. Works really well, from an SEO standpoint.

Thanks again for the great post. I’m tempted to write a corollary on my own blog; although I don’t think I’m qualified to do so yet.

All the best.

Hi Ben, I haven’t used CMS2CMS so I can’t comment on it’s effectiveness. We normally write our migration scripts because in our experience we’ve found that no two systems are created equally. Also most of clients are using custom systems where automated processes won’t work.

Hey wzy, what I would recommend is sanitizing the file name/orig url before you store it in the database and the modifying the function provided above in the redirect script so that wp_query searches for ‘any’ post type which would allow it to retrieve an image. Here’s an example:


// In your function where you save the original url, sanitize the filename before you store it
$cleaned_image_filename = santize_file_name( $image_filename );
update_post_meta( $post_id, ‘_orig_url’, $cleaned_image_filename );

// In the wds_get_post_id_from_external_url function update the following on line 35
$args = array(
'post_type' => ‘any',
'posts_per_page' => 1,
'post_status' => 'publish',
'meta_query' => array(
array(
'key' => '_orig_url',
'value' => $url,
'compare' => 'LIKE'
)
)
);


Thanks David! Glad that you enjoyed!