The time has come to move the goods over to a new content management system and I am looking at either Textpattern or WordPress. The only problem is I have always been reluctant to make the move for FG because there is so much going on I am not sure of how feasible making the move would be.

This is where I ask for your help. If there are any Textpattern or WordPress professionals out there who are familiar with the import abilities of each system then I would greatly appreciate your help. Here is what is in involved with the FG setup:

  • Permalinks: Would either have to stay the same or be able to redirect to the new pages. Prefer to keep them the same, but understand that neither package may ship with underscores in filenames by default.
  • Extended entries Not everything within an entry gets posted on the homepage and for those article we need the ability to have it say “continue reading…” which requires an extended entry field.
  • Strong import capabilities We have over 1673 entries, 6370 comments and 23 authors that would need to make the jump along with a number of templates, but I am thinking the template part might have to be done manually.

Why Make The Change?

I have been using WordPress for many of my new sites and 9rules has a kickass CTO who is amazing with PHP so moving to a PHP system only makes sense. And things just happen a little bit faster in the backend when you are making changes when working with a dynamic publishing system. I understand that MT now has some dynamic capabilities, but it’s also a Perl based system which I am not going to touch.

If there are other alternatives (has to be Open Source) that you can think of that would be easier to make the move with than either Wordpress or Textpattern then by all means let me know.