Migrating a corporate site to WordPress… or not

I haven’t migrated anything like that so I can’t speak to the specifics on mapping fields.

Yes, use Custom Fields of WP, they are powerful and should accommodate all those extra data types you mentioned (phone, etc).

Normally in WP, Custom Fields are attached to posts and pages. If some of your fields are attached to users (phone, address), that’s another tweak you need to look into (plugins or customizing your code for extra user fields).

Good luck with your transition.

k-factor – look at the “flutter” plugin, for cms control, its amazing.

also, more plugin for cms control:

pagemash
idealian category enhancements
ozh admin menu
fold page list

and for better control over users:

Register Plus
Role Manager
Mailpress

this is just my 2 cents, but ive done months of searching and testing, i think this list is the best of essentials for cms wordpress

Thanks for the tips! I appreciate any and all.

I have build several websites on WordPress that needed more features than the basic publishing of content that WordPress brings. You can use the postmeta table for storing the data for these extra features (like your directory) but I have learned that many times this can result in an inefficient way of handling things.

A much better approach is using your own custom tables and writing a set of custom plugins that will do exactly what you want, and store your data exactly how you want it. Using the WordPress plugin architecture and page templates you can create any extra features you want to a standard installation, withouth having to change anything in the core. This is very important because you will be able to keep your installation up to date with the latest version. New features are added constantly and vulnarabilities still show up every now and then so trust me, you want this.

To sum up, go deep into writing WP plugins and the Page Template concept, and don’t be afraid to add your own tables.

But we also have a large directory of professionals that requires many more fields like phone number, email address, education, office, city, etc. I’ve looked at the custom field template possibilities in WP and it looks like this may be the route to take, though importing these records from the MSSQL DB gets foggy since the fields don’t map directly.

I like the custom fields myself, and it should work. As far as migrating the content over, I don’t have any suggestions for that. Would be interested in knowing what you do though in case I should get into a similar situation.

Thanks for the input here. The project is going pretty well so far. I’m getting speedier at writing PHP (coming from an ASP background), and custom page templates and custom fields are doing the trick so far. Some creative use of categories and subcategories has also produced some nice breakthroughs.

I spent a lot of time researching data migration into WP. I even did a migration from my personal custom site to WP as a proof-of-concept. Unfortunately, it was not a very smooth process – definitely not clean enough for me to trust with the corporate site. The good news is my employer has a big budget and we’ll be hiring a temp or two to re-key a couple thousand records. Sometimes the safest solution is some good ol’ fat-fingering.

I have been thinking about moving my company website to WordPress too and like you, our old site was originally written in classic ASP. I’ve done some work in the past making WordPress act as a CMS and saw pretty good results in doing so. Check out my Blog entry here.

I’d be really interested in hearing how many folks do use WordPress for their corporate site. I know there are a ton of “Corporate” themes available so it’s just a matter of someone actually using them. Lemme know how it goes!

Adam

Do not take me wrong, I love WordPress, however is not well suited for large websites. You should consider other CMS solutions.
Maybe a paid one like ExpressionEngine will do it, but is not quite that user friendly in control panel, like WordPress.

You can use WordPress for that too, even I have used it for a large website. But I had to install way too many plugins and some of them I had to hack to achieve the write functionality. So when I upgraded wordpress an a important plugin was not compatible with new WordPress version. Because I customized it I couldn’t upgrade so I had to do it manually.

Use the right CMS for right project.

I have to agree with fldtrace. WordPress works for a great many company sites, but in some cases (especially ones like yours) I would recommend something like Expression Engine. Granted its control panel is not as easy as wordpress, but it doesn′t take long to learn how to utilise it and master the art of creating really feature rich corporate sites with.