Last night we migrated Jennifer’s blog from her free Wordpress.com account to a standalone installation on a third-party web hosting company. Here are my observations and comments on what went well, and what didn’t. As background information the blog is pretty small (around 25 posts) so the problems were fixed manually… on a blog with several hundred entries this wouldn’t be practical and some sort of automated or scripted solution would be needed.
- Export/Import Infrastructure: Wordpress.com lets one export their blog to an XML file. The option is under Manage->Export in the Dashboard. The current release version of Wordpress (2.0.5) does not yet support a Wordpress Import “out of the box” so a plugin is needed. Head over here and grab Technosailor’s importer. You’ll then find the Import option by going to Import and choosing WordPress
- Authors: We were dealing with a one-author blog. As part of the import, one can choose how to map the imported author entries. We had a straightforward mapping (map them all to Jennifer’s user account on the new site).
- Posts: In general, all of the posts imported without any significant problems. No posts were lost and we didn’t end up with any entirely blank posts or other severe anomalies except as some circumstances noted below.
- Comments: Comments seem to have migrated across perfectly and intact.
- Categories: This is the first gotcha. WordPress.com stores categories based on their ID number. On WordPress.com there is a unique ID for categories across the system, meaning that Jennifer’s “foobar” category could have category ID 15872. After migration, there isn’t a category 15872 on the new server, so the post loses its category association. We had to manually update the categories for each post. Perhaps as part of an importer enhancement categories could be matched on name rather than ID, or the user could be prompted to create categories which don’t yet exist on the target server?
- Images: I ran into a weirdness here. Posts with embedded images came across fine. However we also ended up with a second post, same timestamp, that was nothing other than a link to the image. I had to manually delete these duplicate, image-only posts.
Overall the process was fairly smooth and we overcame the speed bumps with some manual labor due to the small size of the blog. If I were attempting to migrate something like Scobleizer, some sort of automated solutions would be needed.
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I started off with blogger.com, but quickly realized that there were some things I wanted to customize a little more than blogger would allow. Friend at work turned me on to Wordpress, and it was the import tools that sealed the deal.
Can’t remember the exact reason (I think it was because I was using the blogger beta templates), but I couldn’t migrate right over. Instead, I had to use their RSS import utility to pull over my junk.
99% of everything came over, but I lost my comments in the move. Thankfully, I only had a few (blog had only been up for a week or two), so that wasn’t the end of the world.