A recent project required an import from an established multi-author blog using BlogEngine.NET to a new WordPress install. Using these BlogML to WordPress instructions, I was able to create my import files and get them into the WordPress database just fine. However…
Most of the blog posts were assigned to the wrong author. Many of the posts were missing their categories.
There were over 2200 blog posts, so there was no way I could manually update each post. What is there to do?
I did what any decent WordPress programmer would do. After deleting all of the imported posts, I worked on debugging and fixing the BlogML to WordPress Importer.
The Fixed Issues:
- Author Assignment: Changed the plugin so that the author_id wouldn’t be based on the key that the author was assigned within one of the importer’s arrays.
- Dropped Post Categories: The plugin would search for the first term_id that matched the name of the post’s category. Sometimes, the term_id would be for a tag (if the blog uses the same name for both a category and a tag), so it would retrieve the term_id for a tag instead of a category. Amended the SQL query to search for the term_id using the given category name and the “Category” taxonomy type.
You can download my forked BlogML to WordPress plugin here.
I’m so glad that this plugin existed before I needed to do this project! It was frustrating at times (thanks to server time-outs because the importer had to create loads of new tags—not the importer’s fault!) but it was awesome getting a .CSV of the new and old permalinks.
Help with How to Import BlogML to WordPress
Do you need help or need to know how to customize the importer to use custom post types or custom taxonomies? Did my forked plugin help you? Comment below or feel free to contact me.
