Tutorial data migration

[adamwoodnz]

Migrate Tutorial posts to become Lessons.

Add redirects from old URLs to new URLs (see #2496)

[kathrynwp]

@adamwoodnz We are ready to do the migration of all non-deprecated tutorials to lessons. I've compiled the list here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D_caQxJs55eIinGTlIb7du_vE5FBxn4ri7pAWI5K2RE/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Could we please keep the original publication date of each tutorial. That way they will show further down the paginated list of lessons.

If we can also please keep the language and any other metadata that is also present in lessons that would be great. Thank you!

[adamwoodnz]

Could we please keep the original publication date of each tutorial. That way they will show further down the paginated list of lessons.

If we can also please keep the language and any other metadata that is also present in lessons that would be great. Thank you!

I'll have a look at writing a script for this, but we should consider manual migration due to the following considerations.

Post meta will be complicated because lessons don't currently support some tutorial fields, and likely don't need to moving forward. We need to decide which need to be kept. The Learn meta matrix shows this disparity:

One important field to note is the WPTV URL, which if set automatically renders an embed at the start of a tutorial. For a lesson the author would be expected to add a WPTV embed block in the content for this. Scripting this would be complex, so we could either add this auto embed functionality to lessons (which may never be used moving forward), or add these blocks to the content manually.

Approaches

There are three that I can think of:

1. Change the post type from wporg_workshop to lesson
2. Create a new lesson post for each tutorial, copying over the title, content, published date and author, and create new post meta records for any chosen fields.
3. Manual migration of 89 tutorials

For all three we'll need to add new post meta fields on the lesson post type for anything not currently supported which we want to migrate.

Pros and cons

Approach 1 is simple, preserves all the post meta and relationships and reduces database duplication. We would still need redirects to ensure there is no SEO impact. We'd need to consider whether we have a backup to roll back changes if necessary.

Approach 2 is more complicated, but preserves the old tutorial in the database. I expect creating post meta during the migration may be more error prone.

Approach 3 is more work, but could be divided up and would be less risky.

@dd32 I remember asking about this before we started the project and I think I remember you saying that you thought manual migration would be the safest bet. Could you please add your thoughts on these approaches?