I use the great web hosts DreamHost and they recently added one click install of WordPress. So I decided last night to move my wife’s blog from Nucleus to WordPress. Here’s the note I added to DreamHost’s knowledge base as a warning.

A couple of tips from my experience moving a nucleus blog to WordPress. I took the last sentence of this article as a suggestion and installed WordPress in a subdirectory which went quickly and easily.

I ended up writing my own custom PHP to transfer the posts, categories, and comments. There is a script floating around, but it just didn’t work.

Here’s the really important tip:

Change your blog URL in the WordPress options before you move the files via ftp.

After I was sure WordPress was up and working, I create a folder and put all the nucleus files in it. Then I copied all the WordPress files to the root of the site. Then I could see the blog, but couldn’t log in. I did some serious hacking to try and get in, but couldn’t get log-in to work. Second I tried changing the blog URLs in the database. Still didn’t get it. Finally I moved all the files back to the subdirectory. Logged in. Changed the base URL (in both places in Options). And moved all the files back to the root. Which worked.

I was able to move over 900 posts and 300 comments from Nucleus to WordPress. My wife loves the link features.

I haven’t decided what to do about Reactuate yet. With the script I used for her blog I could convert Reactuate fairly quickly. But I still feel like if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.