Prexit: WordPress to Contentful

Migrate WordPress posts to Contentful using the WP REST API and the Contentful JS SDK.

• Markdown: Post bodies are converted to Markdown to strip out inline styles and image dimensions.
• Assets: Featured and inline images will be transferred and their references in content replaced.
• Authors: Script looks for CF Person names that match WP User and reassign author attribution.
• Date Published: Preserved

🚀 Usage

1. Prerequisites
2. yarn install
3. yarn start

⚠️ Prerequisites

Webhooks

Make sure to temporarily disable any publish webhooks (e.g. Netlify) because this is gonna do a lot of publishing.

Globally installed

• Yarn
• Contentful CLI (Logged in)

Contentful Content Types

Assumes the following content types are already created in Contentful:

Person: person

For best results, create Persons with matching names so posts authors in the two systems can be matched up and attributions preserved. Otherwise, the fallback Person ID will be used.

Blog Post: blogPost

See fields in source

Contentful Content Management API

Contentful CMA tokens have access to all environments for migration purposes so make sure to double-check the relevant config var to see which is being targeted.

• Personal Access Token

WP Users API route

The /wp-json/wp/v2/users should return a paginated list of users, if it does not and returns an error like the one below (via Wordfence) it will need to be enabled before the author tasks can run effectively:

{
  "code": "rest_user_cannot_view",
  "message": "Sorry, you are not allowed to list users.",
  "data": {
    "status": 401
  }
}

⚙️ Config

Create a .env file in project root. Values required for most of the variables below, or the test config (first) task will throw.

# Base URL for API requests
WP_API_URL="https://website.com/wp-json/wp/v2"

# Optional: Basic Auth credentials for WP API
# Set up using Application Passwords plugin
# This is needed to fetch raw posts which might be
# necessary if you have plugins running in production
# which alter posts in ways you don’t want to bring
# into Contenful.
WP_API_CREDENTIALS="username:G3NE R4TD P455 W0RD"

# WP returns absolute URLS, we use relative
REDIRECT_BASE_URL="https://website.com"

# Generated in web app interface
CONTENTFUL_CMA_TOKEN="[token]"

# Go to Project's Settings > General Settings
CONTENTFUL_SPACE_ID="[space-id]"

# Sandbox environment name, or master
CONTENTFUL_ENV_NAME="[staging]"

# Default locale (in my case "en-US")
CONTENTFUL_LOCALE="[locale]"

# "Person" ID used when a match cant be found
# comparing WP User to CF Person names (post
# author attribution)
CONTENTFUL_FALLBACK_USER_ID="[id]"

🙏 Cite

Lots of inspiration from this article and linked gists, it inspired the general approach and some of the of code is used directly.

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☑️ Todo

• Add dev subcommand to run a limited set of tasks
• Add init subcommand to set up Contentful content models
• Generalize shortcode parsing
• Fix placeholder code for shortcodes
• Migrate categories
• Migrate tags
• Poka-yoke: Ask before updating Contentful