[Paid] Migrating old wordpress comments and users to Discourse

[Quintin_Par]

Continuing my discussion from here:

Manually copying over comments from Wordpress, how do I can create user accounts?

I think the solution is to modify an import script to pull the data over. It typically takes a day to get it done enough to know how much longer it’ll take to finish the job. If you have a budget, you can post in #marketplace or ask me. If not, the simple press importer is a decent place to start.

I was successful in setting up discourse as the commenting platform for wordpress. Unfortunately, there are no migration scripts. Which means one can create a new wordpress post and the corresponding discourse post and comments will be created.

This leads to maintaining two commenting solutions (wordpress and discourse). It’s a messy thing to do.

@simon has a WIP project that needs to be completed

GitHub - scossar/wp-discourse-export: Export WordPress users and content to...

read through the earlier discussion link for context.
I run a small blog and don’t think I can afford these wonderful programmers. Nevertheless, I want to get this started and commit. Are there other people who would want to pitch in?

Relevant discussion:

Wordpress blog, comments and manually copying it to Discourse

I am setting up a discourse forum for my blog and as I understand, there is no way to sync migrate existing wordpress comments to discourse topics and as its replies. Since that is the case, I was thinking of doing this task manually. i.e. Create A discourse topic backdating it to the creation of the blog post Copy over each of the blog post’s comments to the topic, creating/migrating a user account in the process I have around 2,000 comments. Question: Is this a good workflow? Potential…

[simon]

This leads to maintaining two commenting solutions (wordpress and discourse). It’s a messy thing to do.

Yes, this is a real problem that should be solved.

I like this plugin, but I’m not sure that it’s the best way to approach the problem. Using it to migrate your forum (1000 users 2500 comments) would result in over 6000 API calls. These calls will need to be done in batches and rate limited. Other than that, it still needs to be setup to handle categories, and to handle multi-level threaded comments (when there is a reply to a reply.) The last two issues are easily solvable, the rate limiting issue is more of a problem, because it’s dependent on the WordPress site’s server configuration.

I think a better approach would be to create a migration script that is similar to what is outlined here: Migrating from bbPress WordPress plugin to Discourse. Some step by step instructions for using the script could be provided. The benefits of doing it this way are that it could safely handle a migration for sites of any size, and it wouldn’t be dependent on the WordPress site’s server configuration.