For the last few months I have toyed with the idea of adapting my conversion process to convert a Manila site to Drupal. The code I have does it’s thing with standard APIs supported in WordPress – the same APIs are supported in Drupal.
The internal link converter would need to know about Drupal node addresses (WordPress: ‘?page_id=75′, Drupal: ‘/node/75′).
Being too busy with many site conversion however I did not get to mess with it until yesterday – facing a site that would have been heartbreaking to convert in to WordPress. We’ve taken a shine to Drupal around here – and as a content management system it beats WordPress paws-down. Most blogs are better off in WordPress actually, but sites needing content management and offering lots of different content really do better in Drupal.
So I patched up my code and added a couple custom APIs to Drupal and pulled the trigger to convert a client’s Manila site in to a Drupal site.
The result? All the content showed up on the Drupal site with all images served from new Drupal URLs placed as expected and all internal links converted to their new Drupal URLs.
I had to shut off certain aspects of the conversion – so Manila nav bars did not get converted and no Manila members got ported either. I got all the posts, stories, images and Gems. The rest has to be done by hand – which for medium to plus-size sites should not be too burdensome. So thats where I’ll leave it for now – head over to Weblogger.com if you need your Manila site converted to WordPress or Drupal (there must be tens of you!)