{Platform} to WordPress Proposal

[StevenDufresne]

Purpose

To identify an extensible and user-friendly process for soon-to-be WordPress users to migrate to WordPress.

Important ideas/goals

1. We want to reduce all interactions to a single click.
2. Some migrations will be harder than others, we need fallback options.
3. We don't know the best user entry points yet.
4. Use WordPress Playground (essentially portable WordPress) as the main interface. (More on this later).

Flow Chart

I have provided a user flow chart below that I think will work for this use case which doesn't lock us into any specific procedures and allows for multiple entry points to be added as we learn. I think most of it is self-explanatory, except for the Do export and Load export in Playground which I'll explain in more detail below.

Visual chart

Textual representation of the flow chart

• Action: User visits wp.org/data-liberation (or equivalent URL).
• Action: User enters Website Url.
  • Decision: Can we identify the platform?
    • Can we identify the platform answered no.
      • Action: Ask user for platform type.
    • Can we identify the platform answered yes.
      • Decision: Do we have an automation?
        • Do we have an automation answered yes.
          • Action: Do export.
          • Action: Load export in the playground.
        • Do we have an automation answered no.
          • Action: Show user manual guide.

This is my first attempt at making a visual flowchart accessible :). Apologies if it doesn't make sense.

🟪 Do export

This is where the exporting begins and should expose a predictable API so we can create different entry points. We'll need to brainstorm on this further.

How does the export work?

The precise export mechanism for each external platform will vary, however, they should all converge on one idea: their goal is to import the data into WordPress using Playground. WordPress Playground provides multiple API that we can use to import data. We may want to create content scrapers, chrome extensions, and other tools but should all report back to this API.

Why use WordPress playground?

• It offers our users an immediate and portable environment to preview (and maybe customize) their migrated site.
• It provides a predictable export format which includes plugins, themes, assets, and data.
  • This will make the downstream importing step much easier and will standardize imports for all WordPress hosts.
    • (We'll probably need a plugin or tool for this step as well).

🟪 Load export in Playground

As mentioned above, loading the exported site into the Playground will give users the ability to see their site in action and customize it should they be inspired. It's important to note that theming will likely not translate well across platforms, so we want users to be able to see and play with their site in a low-commitment environment. We'll probably need to invest in some innovative ways to expose themes to users in the wp-admin interface to smoothen that transition.

In addition to offering a live view, the playground will also provide a user-friendly interface for downloading their site as a zip file. In my opinion, the ultimate goal would be having connected hosts that users can choose and have an automated setup at said hosts. It would also be cool if the hosts that are included there are hosts that have made contributions to this project :)

Considerations

WordPress to WordPress and/or Within WordPress migrations

They should be able to tie into the do export action although we haven't brainstormed this far ahead.

Next Steps

I want to give contributors the chance to think about this flow and provide feedback. Please start discussion threads on any of the topics that need more clarity or that you can share insight, or simply brainstorm about.

Thanks

[jordesign]

I like this a lot ❤️

I've been doing some thinking about the relationship between any tooling with the Guides and proposed Forum/s. I think this proposal maps really well to that concept.

• For platforms that are supported - the user should not need to worry about it at all - it will just work 🥳 . No need for a guide or forum
• For platforms that are not supported (yet) - we have a user Guide, and the forums for further feedback and support.
• If something goes wrong - we have the forums.

---

One question I have is in relation to the idea of this being a hosted tool on wordpress.org. Asking from a non-technical point of view (so I've got no idea if this is a concern or not) but would running the export > Playground on the shared .org infrastructure be something that is scalable as we inevitably are inundated with folks who want to migrate to WordPress?

[StevenDufresne]

While wp.org will likely end up coordinating the last bits of do_export, I imagine things like authentication and CORS issues would prevent it from hosting all the needed procedures.

At this point, I'm thinking of it more as an API that is passed data, packages it in Playground, and presents it to the user (or auto redirects to a final destination). So in that case, it's mostly a page-view.

If we find there is an opportunity to use WP.org to process the full migration (like maybe an HTML scraper approach that runs on the server), we'll have to consider safeguards against it being used by people with no intention of migrating to WordPress but abusing it for ulterior reasons.

[jordesign]

Ooh - one other little idea that came to mind in relation to this... Imagine if (through the import tooling, or a scraper) we were able to calculate the key colors and typefaces in the source site - and then in the Playground recipe/setup we set the sites Styles to use those....

[adamziel]

I love this! Playground exports already enable what no other export format may ever be able to do:

• Preview the exported site
• Edit the exported data without breaking it…
• …using the editors and UI built specifically for that
• Preserves data, files, plugins, custom database tables
• Removes any PHP and database version compatibility issues
• Keeps producing what was there at the time the export was created
• Is usable in a vanilla browser, local dev env, or even on a mobile device

What inside the Playground export today?

An exported Playground site is a zip with wp-config.php and the wp-content directory. You can import that zip into Playground, run it locally in wp-now, or host it as a real site.

What else is possible with more work?

Playground itself, complete with the portable PHP binary, could be bundled with the exported Snapshot. This would make the export self-contained and usable locally, on any device, and independently from playground.wordpress.net.

WordPress could export itself into the Snapshot format. This would instantly unlock spinning a “temporary test copy” of your site.

WordPress could import from Snapshots to enable easy site transfers and easy “committing” of the changes from the test site.

The above features would also unlock “site templates” that you could turn into real WordPress sites with a few clicks.

What’s wrong with WXR, XML, CSV, JSON, Markdown, etc?

Nothing. These are great formats for exporting content.

However, they aren’t well suited for exporting entire sites. Exporting an entire site as XML or JSON is lossy and requires more work than just exporting an entire site.

What about really large sites, like 1GB or 300GB?

A direct WordPress-to-WordPress synchronization or a WordPress-to-zip resumable streaming protocol would be a better fit for those huge sites. Let's discuss that separately.