Migrating from BlogSphere to WordPress Part 2 the import

In part 1 we talked about exporting data from the BlogSphere template, and prepping it for import in to WordPress.  This post will focus on importing the data in to WordPress, and is not really specific to importing from BlogSphere, this applies to any valid WordPress Import File.

If your WordPress installation does not already have it, you will need to install the WordPress Importer Plugin, the first thing you want to check is that the size limit for uploads is larger then your import file:

If you need to increase the upload limit there is some useful information here on how to, but if you are running on a hosted server, you might need to contact your provider to increase the limit.

Once that is done select your file, and choose Upload File and Import, after the file uploads you will be prompted to select a user for the imported posts.  I suggest that you set up the user you plan to use to author posts before importing, and select it, so that all you old and new posts appear under the same author.

Click Submit and watch your posts import.

Plan on running your import more then once, as you see what worked and what didn’t you will probably tweak your import file, a few times before getting it right.  You also probably plan on testing the import and finalizing your site design before actually getting ready to make the move.  I found a Bulk Delete plugin that made the process of deleting all the posts to import again much easier then using the native delete functionality.  Be warned, the bulk delete plugin works exactly like it sounds, making it extremely easy to delete all your content, the first thing I did after my final import was delete that plugin from my WordPress installation.

Another useful plugin I found is Tidy Up which will run all of your HTML through and clean it up using HTML Tidy.

Next up was to check to make sure that my RSS feed was valid, I used this Feed Validator, to check mine.  I found that some of the posts had excerpt data causing the validation to fail, I solved this by simply clearing out all of the post excerpt fields from the database (this has no impact since I publish full posts on the blog and to RSS, not excerpts).  Here is the SQL code I used to accomplish this, note your table name might be different:

“UPDATE wp_posts set post_excerpt =  replace (post_excerpt, ‘<![CDATA[]]>’, ”);”

Another check of the Feed Validator, and I had valid RSS.

One other word of warning, if you have draft posts in your BlogSphere database, they import to WordPress as published posts, not as drafts, so you either need to clean them up from your database before exporting, or if you want to save them you need to manually set them back to draft status after importing.

That is it for importing in to WordPress.