If you haven’t given up on sleep500 completely, you’d have noticed that over the past week or couple of days or whatever that this site has been more of a useless, piece of shit that normal. This was because we had just changed over our hosting and we were attempting to migrate from Nucleus CMS 3.33 to WordPress 2.8.

As you can see it finally worked BUT AT WHAT COST? I’ll tell you – the cost of the better part of the three-day weekend work gave me just for this purpose (but it was actually really fun, so I am super happy).

I might use a page break for this post so if you don’t really care about it you won’t see the whole thing.

Things You Will Need:

• WordPress 2.1 IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU USE WORDPRESS 2.1!!!!!!
• Nucleus to WordPress 2.1 (important!!!) Migrator
• Optional: a LAMP server running on your computer so you don’t have to ftp shit and no one can see you fail hard live (this took me a while to figure out)

Get your LAMP server thing running, install WordPress 2.1 on it. Then unzip that script and put the “nucleus” folder it generates into wp-admin/import/ and point your browser to the .php file in the nucleus folder. Here is where I started to run into problems.

I tried this on our first host that was running MySQL 4.0.something and our new host that runs MySQL 5.1.something (I think) and I couldn’t get shit to happen. On the old hosting it wouldn’t work because I hadn’t installed WordPress 2.1 (lol) and on the new hosting it wouldn’t work because it couldn’t find the database with the nucleus information in it BECAUSE THAT DATABASE WAS ON ANOTHER SERVER.

At about this point I realised that the posts were not stored in the blogging software itself, but in a database. I hadn’t installed Nucleus, Goss did, so databases were a mystery to me. Once I had realised how much of a n00b I had been I decided that I could do all of this shit offline, on my LAMP server.

I created a dump of my Nucleus database using phpMyAdmin (all default features – I didn’t change anything) then added it to a MySQL database I’d created on my local server with:

$mysql -u user -ppassword databasename < databasedump.sql 

Make sure you give the user you are permissions to do anything on that database:

mysql>grant all on databasename.* to 'user'@'localhost';

Then I had to edit my config.php file (this is a Nucleus file) to reflect that I was on a locally hosted server. You’ll need to change these lines:

	// mySQL connection information
	$MYSQL_HOST = 'localhost';
	$MYSQL_USER = 'user_you_granted_prvileges_for_the_database';
	$MYSQL_PASSWORD = 'durrrrrr';
	$MYSQL_DATABASE = 'database_you_created';
	$MYSQL_PREFIX = '';

Once that’s done, save the file then run your migrator script. If it doesn’t print any errors it will do this:

Bear in mind this took me almost two days and a lot of rage and a whole heap of errors when I tried to run the migrator script.

After this you can export all of the items and whatnot in your WP2.1 install as an XML file (do this in the WP admin area somewhere) and import them to a current version of WordPress or a bunch of other things.

Written by: Zach.
Tags: migration, mysql, nucleus, wordpress.