Steve Reads

I finally migrated this site from Blosxom to WordPress. I’ve meant to do this for forever and a day. Some stuff is broken — e.g., none of the posts have categories attached — but most everything else is working. I was just too frustrated with my own slowness at making the move, so I decided to do it even if it broke some stuff.

Hopefully I’ll get the rest fixed presently.

If you’re curious, I used Jason Clark’s Blosxom-to-Wordpress instructions, and those on the Graceful Exits blog. After all the various edits that all the pages suggested, I used import-blosxom.php. All the flavour files (Blosxom’s spelling of “flavour,” by the way, not mine) I used are in a separate directory. The import also requires that you install the Blosxom interpolate_fancy plugin, which I’ve set aside for you.

Once you have all the plugins and flavours installed on the Blosxom side, you need to set up a parallel copy of Blosxom that displays every single one of your blog posts in one view; I did this by copying the Blosxom CGI file into blosxom_new. Edit blosxom_new and find the line defining the variable $num_entries. Set that to some number that’s greater than or equal to the total number of posts that you have in your blog; in my case, 4000 was plenty.

Now that the parallel Blosxom will load all my posts, I need to dump all of those posts out. wget will do the trick:

wget -O ~/all_posts.txt http://example.com/path/to/parallel/blosxom/index.rss20

Now all your posts will be in ~/all_posts.txt. That should be all you need to do on the Blosxom end.

Now, as for the WordPress end, create a blank MySQL database and give all permissions on it to a database-specific user:

create database mywordpress;
grant all privileges on mywordpress.*
    to 'mywordpressuser'@'localhost'
    identified by 'password';
flush privileges;

Then run the import-blosxom.php script from above and follow the link. That should do it.

Important note: This import doesn’t work right with WordPress 2.3, which is why you don’t see any categories on my posts. WP uses tags rather than categories, and this importer is based around WP 2.2. I’ll figure this out in the next few days. I’m sure it’s not difficult, but like I said: I wanted to get something out there.