Want to migrate from Wordpress, but

I just discovered Grav and set up a staging server to play around with it. So far I like what I see, and I can see this being something I spend a lot of time in!

The problem is, I don't see any straightforward way to migrate my 20-year-old Wordpress site over. I'm willing to completely lose my theme, but moving the actual content -- the pages and blog posts -- appears to be a significant challenge. There are many posts here and elsewhere about migrating, but so far everything I've found depends on plugins that are nonfunctional and/or haven't been updated in years. I was hoping to maybe find a workaround, like ingesting an RSS feed or something, but I'm not having any luck.

Not having a clean, straightforward migration path is a show stopper for me. Is there a plugin or tool I missed somewhere along the way that can pull WP into Grav?

If you already have gone over these topics, then I'm afraid not much new on this matter. At least I didn't see anything 🙄

There's a plugin in the first post that I didn't try. I'll give that a whirl. Unfortunately being 7 years old, I'm not optimistic. Fingers crossed.

Hi @IceGreen

All the exports I have done in my case have been done manually. Sometimes I spend more time looking for a tool than actually doing it. I understand that in some cases this is not feasible... Doing a quick search I saw this and this result. It's very recent. It doesn't work for you? What options have you discarded? Let us know.

I tried the wp2grav_exporter, and while it did pull all my published content, it unfortunately also grabbed all my un-published content such as drafts and private posts. Over 20 years that means a lot of content to manually review, so that solution won't work for me.

The Javascript one looks interesting, but installing node.js in most shared hosting environments is a non-starter. I'll have to see if I can find a cheap one that supports this just for the sake of grabbing the data, then pull everything over to my main account.

If wp2grav_exporter works correctly, the problem I see is the mess wordpress makes by putting any content in the wp_posts table. Maybe you can improve the result by cleaning the database first. You can delete the drafts easily with a few lines in the wp-config...

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0 );
define( 'EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 1 );

... or look for a MYSQL query to leave only the relevant content.

At the moment many administrators are raising their heads to other CMSs. I think it would be interesting to find a workflow that works, or in the official Grav documentation to see that the Migration section has been completed (Hi @rhuk ;), which talks about wordpress but then doesn't address the topic :)

I hope you find a way and share it here for everyone.

If you haven't done it already, I'd also suggest having a look at exporters towards other CMS like hugo or jekyll. Since Grav is markdown based like them, they can be quite useful.
I exported an old wordpress to grav some months ago using (if I remember well) a plugin called "wordpress-export-to-markdown". It was definitely not a flat-smooth-no-bump-straightforward-one-click migration, and I had to manually correct and clean lots of stuff afterwards, but for a ten years old website, it took me maybe just an hour to do the fixes.

I'd suggest you to export your wordpress website to your laptop, find and run some program like wordpress-export-to-markdown to convert the wordpress db into markdown, clean them by hand, which is not too long if you use a convenient code editor or something like that that gives you a bit of power over text files, and then upload the contents to a clean grav website.
I think the time you spend on the manual cleaning is probable to be less than what you'd spend trying to find the perfect migration tool, which may not exist.

Well that's just my two cents :)

In case this is useful for other readers:

If people are interested in exporting from Wordpress then trying the WP to Grav plugin is still worth it. I did it successfully in 2023 so its probably still possible. You get a ton of markdown files in one folder called export. Each item is in its own folder, ready to be dumped into Grav. This is what comes out:

Each item.md has this kind of front matter:

You will probably have to edit some stuff and pages may not come out as well as posts but it is definitely worth doing. You need access to your sftp as the export folder is in the plugin folder for wp-to-grav.

Failing that there is a new Grav plugin that pulls posts from WP but I haven't tried that.

Happy exporting!