Moving to WordPress, Part III: Importing

The next thing I had to tackle was to import all my blosxom entries into WordPress. I used the RSS Import feature with the entries that were in my feed, but I had a couple problems:

• There was some weird linebreaking (Not a big deal–I’m fixing the entries that are really nasty, and only as I discover them)
• No dates (this was a big problem)

For the first batch I imported, I fixed the dates by hand, but that got old. So, I grabbed an RSS 2.0 flavour for blosxom, and gave it a whirl. The only problem was that it didn’t add the full text of the post by default, but that was easily fixed by adding <description>$body</description> to story.rss20.

This was OK, except for a couple of new problems:

• The RSS import only does about 120 items at a time, so I had to slice the file up into smaller pieces by hand.
• The /blosxom/style/categories come in with all their slashes, and don’t make for pretty tags. That was a little more complicated to fix.

Also, I was only seeing partial entries in my WordPress blog after importing the blosxom RSS feed. At first, I thought I was getting a truncated feed, but it turned out that my WordPress theme was using the_excerpt() instead of the_content() in archive.php, search.php, and probably some other places I haven’t discovered yet.