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Kentico CMS Blog Migration Complete
It was long overdue, but I finally was able to finish migrating my blog from BlogEngine.Net to Kentico CMS. And as you can tell, not only did I migrate it, Adam Reece was kind enough to do a complete redesign. So thanks a lot Adam!
I actually enjoyed using BlogEngine.Net quite a bit because of it’s slick widget / plug-in capabilities. However, those capabilities can’t compare to the out of the box functionality of Kentico CMS. Plus the previous version of my blog had a theme that really limited what I could do with content. It was tough to fit good screen shots and code samples in the main content area. So it was time to move.
When I first decided to make the move I was little worried about migrating all of the content without losing anything. But because BlogEngine.Net supported exporting content via the BlogML standard it was pretty easy to get the data out of my old site and into XML.
My next step was to try to use the Kentico Import Toolkit which I have used before to move content to Kentico, however it did not handle the automatic blog URLs well. I’m sure if spent more time with it I could have gotten it to work.
The challenge actually inspired me to create my own application for migrating BlogML files to Kentico CMS. I fired up Visual Studio and started parsing the XML with some basic LINQ to XML code. At the end of few hours, and thanks to the new and improved Kentico 6 API, I actually had content showing up in the Kentico CMS version of my new blog. I plan on polishing up the code and releasing the tool soon.
Enjoy the new blog theme and let me know what you think in the comments.
