Migrate WordPress to Payload

fyr, an old discussion about importing from csv:

and also heads up, I wasn't able to replicate wordpress's media URL structure with payload. more context here:

i am in the middle of migrating a large wordpress project to payload. my migration script is pretty heavily tailored to my specific application, but here's a high level outline of my approach:

1. download a SQL dump of the wordpress database and store locally. this is my source of truth for the existing documents. this approach reduces latency, and cpu load on the existing (live) wordpress app, but requires you to "freeze" publishing on wordpress while the migration is in process.

2. migrate the "primary" content types, without relationships. for example in my application: books, authors, and publishers.

3. circle back and migrate the relationships: for example, assign author(s) and publisher to books.

4. (optional) delete any "orphaned" content, eg authors or publishers with 0 book relationships.

a couple notes...

- every payload collection has a

readonly, indexed field with this format:

. this makes step 3 easy: query a book's authors by their

s, retrieve their payload IDs, use those to build the cross-collection relationships.

- For uploads, I have temporarily disabled

. This way I can create a document for every upload in my db without uploading the file. File upload would be the final step (5), only after I've built relationships between posts and media uploads in payload, and weeded out any orphaned entries (we have 100s of gbs of uploads, most of which are garbage). once the migration's finished, I'll re-enable

.

- for step 2, I iterate over every row returned from wordpress and process them in a queue (better-queue). the queue helps me manage throughput, handle exceptions, etc.