Tech

Nucleus CMS to WordPress Conversion Guide

December 8, 2008
Jamaipanese

As promised I have written a guide using my experience from my recent conversion of my blog from Nucleus CMS to WordPress for other users who might want to do a conversion but unsure of what to do or wondering if it is even possible. Nucleus is a capable blogging platform and although I don’t regret starting out with it I believe WordPress is the blogging platform with much more support and features.

Things to download for conversion

Conversion steps

  • Backup your nucleus installation by going to Admin Home > Nucleus Management > Backup/Restore. My blog had quite a few posts and during a test conversion the backup file (without compression) was so large it was causing an error when I wanted to do a test restore of my nucleus site, because of this I recommend downloading 2 backups; one with and the other without compression.
  • Create a database which will be used for your WordPress 2.1 installation.
  • Upload the WordPress 2.1 to the same directory as you nucleus installation. The only file you should be prompted to overwrite is the index.php file. If you are converting a high traffic site I recommend redirecting visitors to another section of your site with a notice of the maintenance/upgrade or to another site.
  • Install WordPress 2.1 using the database created above and create an administrator user different from the user created during installation with your preferred username and password.
  • Unzip the Nucleus to WordPress Migrator file downloaded before and upload the “nucleus” folder to the wp-admin/import folder.
  • Point your browser to yourdomainname/wp-admin/import/nucleus and follow on screen instructions. Be sure to make the user you created before the author of all current posts on the converted blog.
  • Remove URL Redirect if you used one.
  • Visit your blog page and you should see your new WordPress blog with all your posts and comments imported.
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Conversion Problems and Glitches

After I converted my blog to WordPress I noticed most of my category names were messed up and not converted properly. Just log into your WordPress backend, navigate to category management and fix the category names.

Another big problem was image conversion, images uploaded using the Nucleus image upload tool did not convert at all. Luckily I had created a separate gallery for images used on my blog a few months after started blogging, but I still have to go through early posts on my blog and delete or update image locations.

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Update WordPress

After fixing the category and image glitches upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest version, add your preferred theme, plugins and upgrades. Customize, edit and personalize the look and feel of your new WordPress blog and continue to enjoy blogging, this time with a superior platform.

If you run into any problems during conversion or I wasn’t clear enough in this guide please contact me and I will explain in more detail or offer a helping hand. Also please consider giving this post a thumbs up and review via stumbleupon.

15 thoughts on “Nucleus CMS to WordPress Conversion Guide”

  4. This is about the best guide I have found so far on migrating from Nucleus to WordPress. I’ve been wanting to move one of my blogs for some time but have always been put off by the information I’ve read about the complexities of it all and the problems people have encountered.

    This post has been a big help although I’m still nervous about attempting the move. The thought of having to go back over more than a year’s worth of posts to correct broken images and the like is pretty daunting in its own right.

    My biggest problem is that I have no free MySQL databases available having used up my host’s allocation. I already have a WP install in the root and my Nucleus install in a subfolder (/blog). I’m guessing that unless I free up a database by removing one of the existing ones I’m not going to be able to even attempt the change.

    However, your post has given me some encouragement even though I still dream of some clever coder coming up with an idiot proof solution 🙂

  5. congrats on converting to WordPress! I’m pretty bias towards wordpress, and love them to death… but nonetheless, you made the right choice 🙂

    Let me know if you have any WP questions!

  7. Hi Guys, nice blog, intelligent and informative writing! a definite keeper 🙂 Cheers, Sandra

  9. I seem to run in to a problem where it is unable to find the Caragories table in my new install (the same problem that I had when trying to update a latest install).

    Any Ideas? [cry]

  11. Hi, thank you for a script, it works. But…

    I had Nucleus on Windows-1257 charset and SQL tables with swedish_ci collate 🙁
    Now trying import to UTF-8 and get all specific lithuanian letters incorrect.

    I converted old DB to UTF and now see in MySQL lithuanian symbols, but after transfer to new WP DB, it gets incorect again 🙁

    Any suggestions? Thank you

    1. I too had some problems with badly transferred text and had to manually go through and correct most of them. Sorry I don’t know of anyway to avoid that.

  12. I just used the WordPress from Nucleus CMS Importer at devcu. Actually much better, gets everything, members, logins, etc. One click and its done.

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