Migrating from Orchard to WordPress

I still like the Orchard CMS project, but I’ve found it taking too much maintenance time and having weird issues over the years, so I finally caved and moved this site (and a number more to follow) to (or back to) wordpress.

Even this process was made way more difficult than it should have, the basic process went something like this:

-Over time, my site had become so slow it was hurting indexing and other issues- so I had to look into why. Finally figured out spammers had been comment spamming the site so hard, it had over 45k comments in the database and it was hurting performance. The site had an akismet plugin, which was detecting much of the spam, but it was still staying in the database.

-Run an old version of a BlogML export module so I could move the content to wordpress, but the content it exported messed up categories and tags. Tried upgrading to the latest blogml export module, but it doesnt work with my old 1.2 version of orchard, so it promptly crashed and had to be backed out.

-Orchard site was pretty old version (because it doesn’t do auto updating like wordpress does, so I never have time to go manually update the versions), so I first attempted to update from version 1.2 up to 1.10. After a lot of finagling, I actually got the site to load… at first, it just bombed and wouldn’t let me log in. Digging through log files, finding out what was crashing etc., hours later it finally let me in.

-The blog was not shown in the admin, nor on the live site. Where did all the content go?? Found a way to pull the blog content out, but it’s a mess.

-Tried several more ways to export content from the blog, but either the original slug url’s were missing, or the export content was mangled in some other way. Finally decided to just use the original blogml export, sans tags, and just recreate them by hand. UGH.

Oddly enough, the only blogml import module I found for WordPress also was outdated and no longer worked in current wordpress (actually, php) versions. I had to edit the php to fix this module… I *hate* php code! But at least I got it work. Finally get the import completed, and have been messing around with tags. I wanted to map the old orchard /Tags/tagname to the wordpress /tag/tagname, so I added a url rewrite rule to do this.

Now my site is back in commission, running fast, and will auto update when new versions of wordpress comes out. Oh, I’m still running on a windows server though, so I’m not completely mainstream just yet 😉

Where does that leave my relationship with Orchard? I wish the project much success, and I will be still using it for select projects, but for basic blog-type content, I’ll just use WP for a quick setup and execution going forward.

orchard vs. wordpress popularity

A bit of keyword researching this evening lead me to the phrase “orchard themes”, which I have some interest (and stake) in since I’ve been working with orchard for quite a while now. This exact phrase is searched only about 100 times per month in the US, which didn’t sound like a lot to me. Then I did a search for “wordpress themes” to get a comparison, and sure enough… 100,000 searches per month. The global searches were about the same ratio, roughly 300 and 300,000.

So a very rough approximation of this data would tell us that wordpress is currently 1000 time as popular as Orchard. Ouch!

Oh the currently-empty project I currently have for for this is over at orchard themes on codeplex.