Blog updated from Wordpress 3 to Drupal 6 resulting in a speed increase

Posted on Mon, 2011-01-17 00:02

I have upgraded the blog from running Wordpress 3 with the Akismet and WP Super Cache plugins to Drupal 6. Quite surprisingly, it was very simple.

I wasn't doing anything special with Wordpress which made the transfer of data over to Drupal fairly easy. The Wordress Import module does all the hard work and imports all posts/pages from Wordpress from an XML export you can do from the Wordpress dashboard. Wordpress Import handles taxonomy and users too. Images with working links were copied over without fuss.

With Drupal I am using Views to display posts in various and overwrite the standard taxonomy pages.

Other modules I am using:

  • GeSHi Filter for code markup, I tried Syntax highligher, but GeSHi Filter was able to handle the same tags as Wordpress which made less work (i.e. no work) getting previous code blocks to appear
  • Pathauto for automatic aliased URLs based on date and title of post
  • Path redirect for some URLs that didn't copy over due to custom rules set up in Wordpress
  • Global redirect
  • Transliteration
  • Antispam (I found Akismet good with Wordpress and had problems in the past with Mollom)
  • Inline (attach images using the upload module then add them inline using HTML)
  • Nice Menus
  • Search 404
  • Semantic Views (strip out unnecessary HTML markup generated from Views without editing the tpl.php files)

And best of all, Drupal is running a lot faster than Wordpress.