Wordpress to BC

Hi Asad,

That's a great question. We've tried this a few different ways, but here's what has worked the best for us:

1. Recreate the design as if it were straight from Photoshop. I know this may sound tedious, but as you mentioned, there are so many extraneous files in Wordpress that transferring the code directly can make the project much harder than it should be, both to port and to maintain. If you treat the design just as a design, and then write your own code to recreate the layout, you might find that easier to build and work with over time.

2. Map the content, then consider the best BC content type. Obviously static pages go to BC Pages and blog posts can go to a BC blog, but as you menioned, there's often little things like rotators and sidebar widgets that don't transfer cleanly, or rather would be easier to maintain in a Web App or content holder. It's nice just to have the big picture then slice and dice as needed.

3. Standardize the sidebar. This is the one downside I have experienced with BC's otherwise terrific template structure. I haven't found a way to have per-page sidebar layouts without creating a template per page, but perhaps someone else has a workaround. We've had great success just going to our clients and saying "I know you had 2 widgets on this page's sidebar and 5 on that one, but we need to create a standard sidebar." Have yet to have someone get (too) upset at that step, and it will save you years of headaches in the transition.

4. Replicate functionality for plugins. Maybe it's an RSS feed reader, or just a MailChimp plugin, but they no doubt have some plugin or another that isn't in BC. Most of the time you can replicate the plugin through Javascript or dropping code into a content holder, then dropping it into a template. But occassionaly there's going to be some sort of wacky plugin that'll need to be dealt with by writing custom code. When we've gotten into a hard spot in the past where the client had to have some custom functionality that could not be recreated in BC in a user-friendly manner, we have set that up as a standalone site, then given it a subdomain (phpapp.clientdomain.com) and link to it in the menu. It's an easy way to get through that wall and get the BC site up and running.

At least that's the process we follow. Hope that helps!

-Allen

Hi Asad,

I would love to see the guide! You can email it to bc@flatcreek.com.

Thanks!

-Allen