Migrate from WordPress

[Ryan S]

Does anyone have advice on how to migrate WordPress articles to ServiceNow knowledge articles? We have a client that was using WordPress as their knowledgebase so each article has it's own page, but now we need to move all that content (including linked images) to ServiceNow. Looking for something automated of course.

[Lauren Methena]

Hi, Ryan! We had a vendor help us with a similar project, the biggest difference being that we were going from ServiceNow (SNOW) to SNOW - just updating within the system.

However, I'm thinking, if you were able to somehow load the WP articles into an Excel spreadsheet, you might be able to map that spreadsheet to fields within your knowledge article form. It might take a long time to prepare such a spreadsheet, or maybe there's an easy way to do it. Not sure, because I'm not familiar enough with WP.

Copied/pasted/edited from another answer I gave recently:

We had a bulk update to make to articles within SNOW. We wanted the articles to stay the same, but we wanted to update the categories "en masse" because checking out individual articles to change their categories would take so much time. 

We used an Excel spreadsheet to create a master document. We downloaded all the article info from our knowledge base into the spreadsheet. Then, we made our changes. Then, we uploaded the updated spreadsheet into SNOW.

Takeaways were:

• The SYS ID cannot change. It must stay the same. You cannot mess with those or everything will break and you'll open a portal to a new and dangerous dimension where even Spider-Man won't be able to help you.
• Keep the column headings the same, as those are mapped to your fields in SNOW.
• Be aware of the character limit in Excel cells. (The CONTENT field / column contained our HTML code for our articles, and several of the long articles cut off at that limit - and it was based on the HTML character count, not the article character count, so if an article had a LOT of coding in it, it would cut off sooner.)
• BEST PRACTICE: When you UPLOAD your Excel spreadsheet into SNOW, only keep the SYS ID column and any columns you want to change. What we SHOULD HAVE DONE (and what was recommended but somehow didn't get done?) was only have uploaded the SYS ID and category column into the system, since we didn't want anything else to change. That would have protected the data in all the other fields.

I don't know if this is THE ANSWER or not, but maybe it will help to get you closer. Good luck!

[Lucas Vieites]

Just one addition; if you run into issues with the character limit in Excel, you might want to consider using an XML file as the data source. You can export the WordPress articles directly from the database into XML. For example, with phpMyAdmin if the database is MySQL, or MariaDB.

Kind regards,
Lucas Vieites
P.S. If my reply helped you, please mark it as helpful or correct so other community members can benefit from this information.

[Ryan S]

That's our current approach, but the xml that WP produced is a mess that ServiceNow couldn't comprehend. So we're going to have to convert that to Excel or do some scripting to clean it up. Or are you suggesting the export from the database is perhaps a different type of export? (We didn't do the export ourselves, just received the exported xml so not sure exactly how it was executed.)