Like many new Drupal users, I am originally from Blogger then migrated to Wordpress, then my geek-soul lead me across the path of Drupal (actually my internet guru friend recommended it). If you are reading this blog, I assume you are already aware of Drupal, understand its amazing potential, and also see it as a formidable monster to slay.

All kidding aside, Drupal offers almost endless possibilities at the cost of knowing a fair amount of internet programming.

Well one thing I am rather disappointed in is a non-straightforward migration tool from Wordpress to Drupal. I felt this should have been taken care of long before version 7.0 came out (much less version 5.7). But it is not there, so I write this detailed post on it.

Without further ado, I will bullet point the modules and version numbers I used

1. Drupal 5.7
   1. The reason I did not use version 6.2 is because there really is not nearly as much support, modules, or general concern about it yet. In my opinion and experience, a first time Drupal user should definitely use version 5.7 and take advantage of all the amazing guides out there. See my Blog Roll for them
   2. Must I explain why any sane person would not use Drupal 7.0?
2. Download Prime 357's Wordpress 2.5 to Drupal 5.x/6 software (it is not a module)
   1. If you are not using Wordpress 2.5, quickly update your Wordpress to that version
3. Enabled Clean URL
   1. I don't know if this was required, but it's basically essential if you want your site to get accurately noticed by Google and such.

Prime 357 offers a fantastic guide, but I want to lay out what I went through in more detail, it involved contacting my host's tech support, white listing my IP, and other little adventures. For very detailed, specific information, definitely see his site too.

So armed with my fresh Drupal install and a reckless sense of adventure, I searched the internet for probably 24 hours straight trying to find SOMETHING on migrating. The problem was: I was trying to find the easy way out. Some simple module. Something to hold my hand. Unfortunately, it was not a one step process, but fortunately, brilliant programmers like Prime 357 exist to help out here.

Heck, I even posted a bunch of times on Drupal's own forums begging for guidance. I think the title is kind of funny looking back: For those of you who successfully migrated from Wordpress 2.5 (or blogger), How did you do it? Isn't it amazing how when you ask directly, the answer is given?

So I checked out Prime's site went ahead and installed his problem. But nope. Did not work, I couldn't connect! It turns out, it is not that simple to just connect to your MySQL database. You have to go through a white listing process. White listing is important because any hacker would have a field day if they could just go into a MySQL database, hack the password, and gain complete utter control over your entire site. Man that would suck.

Now I use HostMonster.com which I feel is a fantastic host. They have live tech support chat along with unlimited space usage and bandwidth. On top of that, it is one simple fee and you get everything, $6.95 a month. Sweet deal huh? Now the live tech support is a simple chat box you connect to. All I did was basically open up the chat box, say "how do I white list my domain" and boom! They gave me the answer.

I guess I should mention how I Google searched it and poked around cpanel and didn't find anything. The white listing was actually in my billing section. Who would have thought? On that note: my new policy is whenever I have a hosting related question, I just open up the chat box and get a quick answer.

Okay, so I white listed my domain, but now… (if you look at Prime's instruction manual) you'll see how you need a password for your wordpress and Drupal domain. Uh Oh… I never knew what password to use. I used fantastico to make my wordpress database. While fantastico is great for a simple setup, the normal password I always use didn't seem to work.

So I had to go on another quest to find that Wordpress database password. Well, long story short, I bugged the HostMonster tech support guy (we were still on live chat). It turns out, that thing is conveniently located in wp-config.php file. Isn't that a little …creepy… your password is RIGHT there in your wp-config.php file? Unfortunately, I can't give any advice on how to hide that password since I don't use wordpress anymore.

Understand that this didn't happen instantly, about thirty minutes had passed of my digging around everywhere for that password. For example, you'll probably laugh at me, but I could not figure out what the damn table-prefix for Wordpress was. I seriously searched everywhere online for what that was supposed to be and found nothing. Not until I looked carefully at Prime 357's picture here did I find the utterly simple answer: wp_

Luckily, I didn't use fantastico to make my Drupal database, so I knew the password there and there was not table prefix. I was in. I finally clicked the "connect" button and it worked.

But that is certainly not the end. Refering to the next pages of Prime's guide, I had to set everything correctly. Now this wasn't as bad, BUT I had to do all the steps within 30 seconds or my server would time me out! At this point, it was fairly straight forward following Prime's guide though.

So that almost finishes it. The next steps, for me, were to make sure every post on my front page was trimmed and pathauto bulk generated for all my new, imported blog posts. To briefly explain what I just said in layman's terms: pathauto is a module which takes the rather ugly default URL Drupal produces and automatically changes it to the title of your post. (There are a few more steps involved, enabling the Clean-URL feature, but all that stuff can be found easily in a Google search).

To make sure all those new imported entries had proper length, I actually had to get a new module for that. I got something called ReTease which accomplishes that. Remember to read the support files for pathauto, retease and all these things. Unfortunately, this particular post is not a complete step-by-step for all my modules (though I may write one out one of these days).

So all these things mentioned here took me probably 20 hours worth of research, implementation, and writing messages on the Drupal Support Forums. I hope this saves some of you some time. Again, I apologize that this is not super detailed, but all the details I did leave out can be found on a simple Google search or looking at the module help files.

This blog is just getting started and I may as well just write out a full, step-by-step, how I did it guide for all aspects of Drupal that I used. Stay tuned!!