Some information and advice on importing old blog posts into Wordpress.

For those who came in late…

Regular, or long time, readers of disassociated.com will know I have only very recently (and finally) implemented a Content Management System, or CMS, namely Wordpress, or WP.

Prior to this the site was comprised of static HTML documents. Basically I’d create a template using notepad and simply duplicate it each time I needed to add a new page. It was a great way of keeping my XHTML hand coding skills up-to-date, but that’s about where the advantages ended.

Trying to make a modification to the site, or even a post, sometimes involved editing numerous static files. A bit stupid really when applications like Wordpress are so readily available and easy to use.

The Problem

The decision to migrate to a CMS was easy enough, however migrating almost five years of blog posts wasn’t as straightforward. To make matters worse these posts had ended up in different folders on my hard drive as, each time I redesigned the site, I totally junked the previous version.

At the time of each of each redesign I concluded it was too much work to cut and paste old blog posts onto the template of the new design so I simply took the posts offline.

Not smart. Migrating one year’s worth of blog posts would have been nothing compared the task I ended up with: transferring five years of posts to one location!

The Template

While there are a number of upload, or import, methods you can choose, in the end I opted to migrate all the old posts in RSS format to my WP database. I created an upload template for the blog posts that looked like this:

• <item><title>POST TITLE HERE</title><comments></comments> //
• <pubDate>Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:02 +0000</pubDate> //
• <dc:creator>YOUR WP USERNAME</dc:creator> //
• <category>POSTING CATEGORY</category><description></description> //
• <content:encoded>POST CONTENT INCLUDING HTML</content:encoded></item>

Some RSS stuff

There are a few things to take note of here. Make sure the days and dates are in RSS format. Typically this means days and months are in the short three letter format. For example Monday becomes Mon, and November becomes Nov. Times are also in the 24 hour clock format. This can be “converted” back to the full format once in the database, by the way.

Things like the username you create for yourself, and any other people/authors who have written old posts, will need to match whatever you place in the dc:creator field, when you set up Wordpress. If your name is Sarah you need to place that in all the dc:creator fields, and then create a WP profile in the name of Sarah.

If your blog has, or has had, other posters or authors, you will need to repeat this step for their contributions. Be sure to create whatever WP usernames you intend to use on your blog before importing the old entries. The WP database will become “confused” if it sees posts by Mike, but cannot find a WP profile for Mike.

Copy, Paste, Check, Save

The next step is probably the hardest and longest, depending on how many “static”, or old, posts need to be transferred. Much copying and pasting work lies ahead! Place a line break between each blog entry as you go.

Once this is complete check all RSS tag delimiters (that is: < > ) are in place. It is possible, as happened to me, that some of these were erased during the copy and paste process. In some cases part of the affected post appeared in the WP database, sometimes nothing at all showed up!

Save the file with an xml file extension, for example upload.xml as for RSS files.

Upload

To physically import or upload the file go to the WP dashboard, and on the taskbar select Manage, then import then RSS from the listed options. Browse to locate your upload file on your hard drive, and then click “Upload file and import”.

Depending on your connection speed, and the size of the upload file, this may take a minute or two, but I found the process to be quite fast.

Sometimes only part of the file will upload. If this happens ascertain what posts did upload by going to Manage, then posts. Return to your upload file and delete off whatever HAS uploaded. Then upload what posts are left.

And then you should be all finished!

A few other things…

Other things you may need to consider will be how to deal with with images you had in old posts. You will have to work out where they are to be placed, whether that is inside your WP folder, or outside it on another part of your web server, and include the appropriate file/directory path to the image when preparing the upload file.

If you also had internal links, say posts that referenced others on your blog, you will also need to adjust the URI accordingly.

If you have any questions about the process I used, please leave a comment, or contact me, and I will try and help.