Question

I have a custom made CMS system with a relatively small number (~1000) of articles inside my SQL Server database.

I want to migrate the whole site to WordPress. Is it possible and if so, then how, to migrate the data (one table – Article) from SQL Server to a CSV file and then import it into WordPress?

Thanks!

update:

The structure of table Article looks like this:

ID_Article - int (pk)
Title - nvarchar(max)
Summary - nvarchar(max)
Contents - nvarchar(max)
Date - datetime
ID_Author - int (fk)
Image - nvarchar(max)
Promoted - bit
Hidden - bit

There also categories done with an associative CategoryToArticle table. The only thing that needs to be moved is CONTENTS (optionally merged with Summary) DATE and TITLE (would be cool if it was merged with author’s name “John Doe: My Article title.”). It can be categorised as “Archive” or soemthing like that, image and other flags can be dropped completely.

Answer 1

You could use an automation software such as BlogSenseWP to import the CSV items in as new posts, but you would have limited control over the dating and tagging would have to be auto-regenerated using the Yahoo Tags API (included in the software’s features). Categorization might be tricky as well, but there are keyword based auto-categorization filters that could help you get close.

Otherwise you would might want to investigate a custom PHP script that imports the CSV fields desired into variables, and then loops through them adding them to the wordpress database using wordpress functions.

Here is a custom way of adding a post to wordpress:

$permalink_name = sanitize_title_with_dashes( $title );
$post = array(      
                              'post_author' => $author_id
                              'post_category' => $cat_id, 
                              'post_content' => $description, 
                              'post_date' => $date_placeholder,
                              'post_date_gmt' => $gmt_date,
                              'post_name' => $permalink_name,
                              'post_status' => 'publish', 
                              'post_title' => $title,
                              'post_type' => 'post',
                              'tags_input' => "$tags",
                              'original_source'=> $link
                            );  
                            $post_id = wp_insert_post( $post, $wp_error );

You would have to include the wp-config.php file at the top of this script to load the wordpress code environment.

The above is a crude summary. It would take a thorough understanding of PHP to fill in the ommited code and complete the concept script.