RainMaker Digital is the digital marketing platform from the folks over at CopyBlogger. Since 2009 BlogWranglers has specialized in migrating websites and blogs from another digital marketing platform, HubSpot, so when Chris made contact about migrating this seemed like a good opportunity to put our experience to work on a similar platform.
Why Migrate from RainMaker Digital?
Chris found that RainMaker Digital stopped selling the platform as a standalone product. It would seem that development has also paused or ceased. An entirely new platform is being developed.
This RainMaker Digital migration project was for a proficient blogger who started publishing on WordPress back in 2004. In this case, 15 years of content looks like:
- 4,821 posts
- 142 pages
- 335,000 comments
- thousands of images.
- the database was 420+MB large.
The project started with an XML file provided by the client. However, the import kept timing out due to the size of the file and the import. We tried again with a more powerful server after seeing that an overnight import was not enough time to finish the job due to the immense amount of comments, metadata, and images.
Massive Number of Comments
It was the 335,000 comments that bogged down the server and required so much time.
After discussions with the client, we learned that the comments were not needed. Excluding the hundreds of thousands of comments would certainly speed up the project.
However, the WordPress importer does not include an option to NOT import comments.
So we looked to the RainMaker Digital platform but found no quick way to delete all of the comments in bulk. We have used a plugin or two in the past that allow editing of the database. This would have allowed us to remove the comments from the source, however, RainMaker does not allow installing plugins.
No Database Access
Direct database access would have worked, but we did not find that capability on this platform. HubSpot provides no database access either.
We wrote a custom script to delete the comments from the live site, which simulated deleting them manually, but the system started to rate limit the script at 40 comments at a time. This was untenable because it would have taken days to delete the 335,000 comments.
Custom Scripting
To solve this issue of excluding the comments we returned to the importer code and modified it to exclude the comments and start importing only the blog content and then the images. We did this locally on a server powerful enough to handle the job.
Finally, we were able to upload the thousands of pages and posts, including the images and assets to WPEngine via FTP.
Within 10 minutes of submitting an invoice, the client provided full payment and a testimonial.
Testimonial
“My blog has years and years of posts, hundreds of pages, and all kinds of little crevices and things that could break. Jim and the team at BlogWranglers turned the project around quickly, with no errors, and took my precious website off one complicated platform and put it onto a worldwide standard without breaking a sweat. My website is my LIFE and I trust Jim Spencer and BlogWranglers with my life.” — Chris Brogan, President Chris Brogan Media.
Testimonial from another client that migrated from RainMaker to WordPress.
David Archer
If you need help moving from RainMaker, HubSpot or another platform, head over to our contact page and let us know how we can help you.