Yesterday one of the web sites I maintain had a big problem – lots of ugly PHP error messages about “eregi is deprecated” and we were locked out of the control panel, pMachines, that manages the site’s content. On the other hand, the hosting company was excellent, their reply being so quick that I initially thought it was a duplicate acknowledgement of my support request, and they didn’t pull the “what have you changed?” or “we don’t support user applications” tricks. They had changed the server over to PHP5 and had switched off PHP4 support. pMachines is no longer updated, so I bit the bullet and spent all day migrating everything to WordPress, copying the content and building a custom page template. And of course, just as I was ready to show off my labours, one of the site’s users discovered the original site was working properly again – the host had restored support for PHP4. Yes, I know, setting up WordPress was a learning experience. “Bugger”!

In fairness, my eagerness to make the changeover was because I was looking for a test bed. While I use pMachines to run this blog, and it is reliable-enough, it does show its age. Character encoding is messy and pasted material regularly screws up one RSS reader or another, posts can’t be in more than one category, and it’s a stretch when one (mis)uses pMachines to manage parts of a site other than the blog. So I’ve been looking at alternatives.

I’m a little wary of WordPress after a friend used it to set up a blog which was then hacked, compromising his forum – and I’m the one who maintains that. pMachine is old and too small a target for hackers. WordPress though….

But yesterday’s experience was much more encouraging. The site isn’t really a continuing blog, and WordPress’s Pages feature worked well as a basic content management system for a collection of independent pages – we’re not even using its blog features. Especially nice was cutting the original site’s page contents from a browser window and pasting them into WordPress’s page entry form which nicely picked up all the formatting. This made light work of converting the site’s 21 pages.

Whether it will be so easy to convert this site is another matter. However, the links from migrating from pmachine to wordpress look helpful and certain principles of data migration always remain. When you want to get data into a new system – whether it’s masses of financial or business data or simply Lightroom keyword – you begin by exporting dummy data from the new system because you can usually be sure it’ll import it properly. Then see if you can get your existing data into that format. Never start from what you have – start from where you want to be.