Technical Challenges of Migration

Since the last post, I’ve finished the migration of this site from Textpattern and Gallery to WordPress and Piwigo.

Overall, the process went smoothly, but naturally there were some hitches.

Once I figured out the Fidelity theme’s options and how content was chosen for its’ various components, I needed to migrate my Textpattern content into WordPress. There’s a WordPress Plugin to automatically migrate, but it’s hard to find since it hasn’t been updated in almost three years. I think WordPress’ Plugin search filters by activity, so unmaintained plugins sometimes don’t show up.

Running this importer is straightforward and has no options, other than the credentials of the Textpattern installation’s database. The gotcha: it imports users from Textpattern, and if a same-named user exists, it will overwrite the password. I had two users on both systems, and the passwords were both overwritten, locking me out of WordPress until I figured out what the old system’s credentials were. There were some text encoding problems, but with so few posts, I just fixed them.

Supposedly, WordPress’ Jetpack supports Markdown, but the Markdown-laced posts imported from Textpattern didn’t seem to convert. Again, with so few posts, I just converted to regular HTML tags. This was done in conjunction with fixing many of the image links – a move from Gallery2 to Gallery3 seemed to have broken many older posts’ image links.

After many years, and major versions of using Galleryproject for my online photo album software, it became abandonware. Google searches indicated that the natural replacement was Piwigo. There have been very few issues migrating from Gallery to Piwigo, so kudos to the Piwigo team for creating a good migration tool. I feel like I’m going to maintain the gallery content separately from the web site proper – any images I used on the main website were sucked in with the Image Teleporter plugin, so now I don’t really have to fix any of the Gallery-style URLs to work with Piwigo through URLRewrite trickery or item mapping via some lookup table.

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