Creative Loafing Blogs

We’ve decided to merge the Bad Habits blog with the Fresh Loaf blog at atlanta.creativeloafing.com. “Why?” you ask. Well, we think it’s best if all of our freshest content is centrally located so our readers don’t have to go back and forth between things.

Making it happen, though, was quite a challenge. Out of the box, Wordpress allows you to export (and import) its database. If you wanted to move your WP blog, you could easily export the posts, comments, links, authors and custom fields, and drop them onto another WP install.

Since all of our blogs are WP, we thought, “It can happen.”

The plan was to combine all Bad Habits posts into one category (”Bad Habits”); export all the posts into a file (which Worpdress calls WXR); import it into Fresh Loaf, which would create the same category (”Bad Habits”) and drop all those posts there.

Yes — theoretically.

This isn’t the first time we’ve imported into Wordpress; we did it when we moved from Typepad. We ran into a problem with the PHP file that handles the import. We were only able to complete the import after digging the Trac for a file that would correctly import all categories AND authors (this one). The file that came with our WP Mu package didn’t associate the posts with the new authors. It just merged them all with the admin user. I’m not sure if the newer version of the file does the same thing; fortunately, we don’t have to import any more Typepad / Movable Type blogs.

Well, now, different platform, same story. The PHP file that handles the Wordpress import does something similar. The file we had out of our 1.1.1 install didn’t even budge. It just froze.

I realized this was because the export file generated out of the Bad Habits blog was too big – even though its size was 1.9 MB, clearly under the 2 MB limit.

I had to export the Bad Habits posts per author; only then would the importer handle the files. But then, a funny thing happened. The posts were not being associated with their respective authors. The new category was being created, but the posts were being assigned to the admin user.

Again, time to dig the Trac for a newer version of the Wordpress PHP importer. After messing around with more than six different versions of the files (none of which did what they’re supposed to do, not even the newest one), I found one file that was associating the authors (this one).

Except it was creating a new, blank category for every post AND every image imported.

What gives?

To go around that, I made the default category which was supposed to take in all the imported posts. So that when all those new blank categories were being created, I had to go back and delete them, causing the posts to be associated with the default category (something Wordpress does when you delete a category).

But what if you were supposed to preserve the old categories from the Bad Habits blog? I don’t even …

The important thing is that I was able to import the posts and have them show up under their respective authors.

Now, if only I could export/import those tags …

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Creative Loafing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.