Yeah yeah, I must confess! I'm a Wordpress fan and I think they have written fantastic software. BUT, the recent work Robin (design zevenseas) and Daniel (theme, search) have done has made me a EBE fan too. Still, there are lots of things that need to be done because from an end user point of view it isn't the easiest and most powerful platform yet. Adding your own widgets or even webparts isn't possible for the most OOTB theme's and that is important for end users. And now programmers will say "ha, I can add them". I know but that is not the point. Hopefully most EBE theme's will get a zone to add webparts, that would be nice.

Another important issue is the migration of old Wordpress posts to SharePoint. I haven't found any tool yet how to do that. No server side tools and no desktop tools that use the WSS 3.0 lists API. I strongly believe in a tool that can be installed on a desktop machine (no SharePoint server) and that could migrate my Wordpress posts to a SharePoint EBE. For now however there are a few approaches to get the posts in.

Windows Live Writer

Just create a account for your old Wordpress blog and one for the EBE and re-publish them one by one. You know, open a Wordpress post and re-publish it to the EBE.

Read only version of your old Wordpress blog posts

Hmm, there is another way to do it and it can work on a Shared SharePoint server. You could use the DataView webpart and link it to your Wordpress RSS feed.

Or better, if you have the RSS viewer webpart you can do it out of the box.

Another option would be to use a MySQL script to link directly to the old Wordpress posts. Like the script below:

<?php

  //get filter
  $filter=$_REQUEST['select'];
  //set header
  header("Content-type: text/xml"); 
    //Connection to database
  $server="<your server>";
  $username="<your username>";
  $password="<your password>";
  $database="<your database>";
  $table="<database table>";
  $query = "SELECT * FROM " .$table;
  //$query = $filter. " " .$table; 
  $xml_output = "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>\n";
  $xml_output .= "<items>\n"; 
  //set connection
  $con = mysql_connect($host,$username,$password);
  //check if ok
  if (!$con)
    {
      die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
    }
  //select data
  mysql_select_db($database, $con);
  //set query
  $result = mysql_query($query);
  //get fields
  $fields = mysql_listfields( $database, $table); 
   //Count fields and put counter on zero
  $field_num = mysql_num_fields($fields); 
  //browse records
  while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
    {
      //xml output
      $xml_output .= "\t<item>\n";
      $i=0;
      //Get all fields
      while ($i < $field_num)
        {
          $name  = mysql_field_name  ($fields, $i);
          $value=$row[$name];
          $value = str_replace("&", "&", $value);
          $value = str_replace("<", "<", $value);
          $value = str_replace("", ">", $value);
          $value = str_replace("\"", """, $value);
          $value = str_replace("", "<br>", $value);
          $value = str_replace("", "</br>", $value);   
          $xml_output .= "\t\t<" . $name . ">" . $value . "</" .$name. ">\n";
          $i++;
        }
      $xml_output .= "\t</item>\n";
    }
  mysql_close($con);
  $xml_output .= "</items>";

  echo $xml_output;

?>

By using SharePoint designer you could hook up the DataView webpart to above script. You could actually mix that with another RSS feed.

Importing the posts

This is a little bit more work. You could write a VB Express tool that reads the RSS and uses the lists webservice to add new items to the Posts list. Would be a very handy tool and best would be to make it work with all RSS feeds. Nice thing is that it can be a client tool that does not need SharePoint.

So, overall a lot of options that can be used.