As mentioned in a prior post, I do plan to convert more than a dozen of my sites over the next few months from PHP-Fusion to WordPress – so I need to automate and document as much as possible, and potentially share the ideas and the work if anybody is interested.

I see the steps as following:
1) Ongoing Learning – Keep trying new things and learning with WordPress
2) Page/Post/Article Conversion Script – Write a script (probably PHP or VBScript) to extract custom pages, news, and articles into the RSS import format.  Here’s my initial research on that:  WordPress.StackExchange.com.
Practice export/importing creatine retail price data from several different sites.
Would need to research if categories can smoothly export across, and if that is a good structure for WordPress.  WordPress does have categories, but not separate ones for News, Articles, Images, Web-Links, etc…. WordPress tags would probably have to manually assigned after the scripted conversion.
3) Embedded-Links – Manually change any interpage links. Ideally software could do this, but for my own sites, I think it will be faster to just do it manually.
4) Web-Links Conversion – Experiment with “Link Library” plug-in, as a possible replacement for PHP-Fusion “Web-Links”.  I have a feeling that the links will probably have to be manually done, but I will investigate the possiblity of a direct update into MySQL if feasible.  I doubt the plug-in has any import.
5) Theme Selection – experiment with various themes and decide if the free ones will work, or if there is a reason to go with paid themes or a “framework” (such as the “Genesis Framework”).
6a) SidePanels – This should include replacement for “side-panels” in PHP-Fusion. Typically, the text in the side-panels is small enough it could be copied and pasted, but a script to download the text might also be in order.
6b) Navigation-Menu – This will also include navigation (how to replace the upper and left menus.
7) Forums – I don’t use Forums on my PHP-Fusion sites, so this is not a concern to me.  If you do, this will be a major concern.
8) Members – At one point I thought using site-membership was a good way to collect emails, but I now believe IContact or AWeber are better solutions.  However, I will probably checkout “BuddyPress” to see what social-networking/communication features work with WP3.0.  If you need a membership system, I used “WishList” ($) on one of my sites (where people paid a fee to buy a learn-Spanish membership).
9) Images and Photo Albums/Downloads/Polls/Other – It’s debatable if articles/posts should continue to link to the /images/xxxx.jpg type files that I have uploaded, but it shouldn’t hurt. They could optionally be imported into WordPress’ media system. However, I don’t use the Photo-Gallery feature of PHP-Fusion.  If you do, there’s probably are probably numerous gallery/photo plug-ins, but I’m not sure how the conversion process would be if you had hundreds of photos.
10) Redirects – create replacement scripts for PHP-Fusion so that links to existing web pages will be redirected to the new pages containing equivalent content.

Here’s a sample of one the sites I’ll want to convert:
http://biztalk-training.com.  All my other sites are almost cookie-cutters of that, different articles, different products, different links, different testimonials, but essentially the same theme and general layout.  I link to my own common E-Commerce site on all my sites, so there’s no real change to that (except perhaps a banner).

If you would like to contribute, leave a comment below.  We can set up an official open source project for this.  I recently did a very small one at http;//ConvertMyNotes.CodePlex.com (a PhatNotes to Evernote Conversion script and procedure) and I prefer to use CodePlex.   CodePlex gives you 30 days between the time you open a project there, and the time you “go live” and publish it.