Converting from Community Server to WordPress

I’m going to switch from Community Server to something else.  At this point, it looks like it’s probably WordPress.

I’ve been looking for a project I can use to familiarize myself with the nuts and bolts of Java development, so migrating my blog content will be my project.

As part of a different project, I’ve also been thinking about how to represent things as XML that are commonly stored in databases, simple things like blog posts and forum posts.

An RSS or Atom item is the closest we’ve got, but it doesn’t include enough information, and it’s not really a format designed for representing a single blog post, so much as it is a format designed for transmitting summaries of a set of blog posts.  At this point it matters more that I get them out of the tool that’s managing them and into XML somewhere; if the format I choose turns out to not be the best, at least it’s XML so it will be easy to run them through a processor to convert them into whatever I do decide on.

So my first task is to use Java to write a tool to connect to my SQL Server database and extract all my blog posts, and write them out into separate XML files.

This would be about a 20 minute job for me with .NET since I have a lot of familiarity with the .NET framework and the Visual Studio IDE. 

Eclipse doesn’t come with a database browser, and Java doesn’t comes with a JDBC driver for SQL Server, so my first task is getting my tooling set up.