Transfer WordPress to Discourse

Hey everyone, I was wondering if there is any plugin or add-on to help me move everything on my site, currently running on WordPress (self-hosted) to Discourse - entirely. This means that the site is no longer powered by WP but Discourse. I really like this platform and was hoping I could use it for my main site.

Note: I’m not looking for a WP & Discourse integration. If it’s possible to transfer from WP to Discourse will my old urls will redirect to new url (301 redirect) so that it doesn’t hurt my SEO and visits. Thanks

Anyone? Can help me answer this? @codinghorror

If your wordpress site is a blog, check out @sam’s blog plugin:

I don’t get it :frowning:

Discourse is a discussion forum. Wordpress can be a blog or a more general content management system. The plugin I mentioned let’s you create a blog that runs on Discourse. As of last time I looked, it is not a point and click process and requires programming ability for any customization.

1 Like

Technically you cant. Wordpress is a blogging platform, Discourse is a forum system.

Maybe you are looking for another blogging platform like https://ghost.org/

Thanks. But that’s not what I’m looking for.

I’ve known ghost blogging platform since it was first in beta. But that’s not what I’m looking for. Thanks though.

What exactly are you looking to do?

If you go in more detail, we can help you!

1 Like

Like I said yesterday, I’m looking for a way to transfer from WP to Discourse. I’m not talking about integrating them but instead turning transferring posts, images, and stuff from WP to Discourse.

In other words, you want to scrap the blog, and show comments as though they were Topic replies?

Thats not really a practical use for Discourse.

We have a bbpress importer you could adapt, but you are going to need some dev skills

2 Likes

I wonder, what do you think is the problem with using Discourse as a blogging platform? Why isn’t it practical? To me, it looks like Discourse could quite well be used for blogging.

You’re not getting useful answers because wordpress can be used for many things (blogs, ecommerce, product sites, news portals, etc) and without seeing your site or knowing what it does, it’s hard to give good advice. Perhaps you could share a link?

Having said that, if you’re using wordpress as a simple linear blog, something like GitHub - SamSaffron/blog: samsaffron.com blog plugin for Discourse is one piece of what you’re looking for.

Here’s roughly how you’d move your posts over and use it:

  1. Generate the discourse topics by pointing the rss/atom feed polling feature to your current wordpress install. This would migrate the posts but not the urls.
  2. In the discourse rails console, for each topic, create a custom field called permalink with the path portion of the post’s wordpress url.
  3. Modify the GitHub - SamSaffron/blog: samsaffron.com blog plugin for Discourse plugin to suit the look, feel and layout of your site and install
  4. Turn off feed polling and retire your wordpress site.

If your wordpress site is something like http://techcrunch.com/ or a product or company site where the ability to create pages with arbitrary urls with arbitrary content via a point and click interface is important discourse isn’t going to work very well.

5 Likes

Without SAMs plugin, it would simply be a forum since other people can post topics as well.

If that’s your main (only?) problem, then the solution is very simple: category permissions.

1 Like

Hmm, thats true. Now that I think of it, I would love to see some users do that!

1 Like

Thank you! Very helpful