I like sticking with the underdog. In 2005, I compared several blogging platforms and settled on Nucleus CMS. For five years, I have happily blogged with that software, enjoying its fast speed and sufficient range of plugins. Many thanks to the Nucleus development team for producing a superb, low-overhead blogging platform.
Over that time, the WordPress plugin library continued to grow. Finally, the gap between it and Nucleus became too much. I had to work around Nucleus’ image embed codes and email notification systems. I repeatedly cleaned up rogue HTML inserted into template. It was awkward to post from my phone. I wanted social media plugins. I finally capitulated and migrated to WordPress.
Migration went really smoothly. Thank goodness for structured content, self-hosting, and the open source community! I installed James Sasitorn’s import utility and added some code to copy images to the new installation. Because I hosted my own blog, the script was easily able to migrate content from one set of database tables to the other.
WordPress was really easy to set up. I had the blog running and old posts imported within about an hour. I spent another hour researching, installing, and configuring a half-dozen plugins. I even migrated the old Nucleus item ids into the WordPress database and wrote a tiny script to permanently redirect requests to old Nucleus URLs to the new WordPress ones! This should keep links from Google and other websites from breaking.
I plan to keep this blog simple. Let me know how it works for you. Please let me know if anything breaks from the old site.
Richard Kassissieh is Director of Technology and Learning Innovation at