Moving content from Wordpress to Hugo

Going from one CMS to another can be huge challenge - especially as I wanted the various pieces I’ve managed to bring along from the past 20 years along (content from the first years of the site is sadly lost over time).

Getting content out of Wordpress

Getting content out of Wordpress is quite easy. It has a built-in export function and while it took some time, resulting in a large zip file. As Wordpress powers huge parts of the Internet, the export format is well-understood and documented so it only to a little time to find a tool which could do a conversion from the Wordpress export to Marked which is what the Hugo CMS wants.

Converting content from XML to Markdown

I found an article with a link to a script which could do the heavy lifting. It did most, and I’ve been manually going through the posts from through the years and doing a light editing to make sure they are readable on the new hugoCMS site.

More manual work

While computers can seem magical, they can actually not do magic and content errors which have existed for years came to light as I went thorugh the content.

I found a number of broken images which I either lost through the years (by not moving all content to a new server, when the hosting changed) or hot-linked to sites which don’t exist anymore.

I’ve almost from time to time been quite sloppy with tags and categories for content, and at the cost of a lot of broken links, I’ve managed to merge some categories together and limiting the tags used slightly.

During the migration, I’ve mainly worried about the core original content, and right now you can’t find the “time-based” archives on the site. They are basically meta-data which can be generated from the source content, and as they were not part the templates in the Mainroad theme for Hugo I’m using right now, they had to wait until I was more familiar with the Hugo CMS.