Content Migration

We’ve changed this blog to use WordPress instead of our own hosted Drupal installation, and I’ve got all the old posts dumped to an XML file. WordPress doesn’t know how to import the schema we’ve got, though, and it’s made trickier in that the posts to all three of our blogs were stored in the same database table. So getting it all sorted out into a file format that WordPress can import is taking a bit of time. What we have is a single file of XML. What we want are three files formatted as WXS (which is a WordPress specific format that sort of looks like XML but which isn’t actually documented anywhere). I do have a sample WXS file which I’m using to reverse engineer the transformation, but I’m also going to want to split the posts up, some to this blog, some to the QBCPS blog, and most to Junglemonkey‘s blog.

If each record were a single line, I could probably use sort, grep, and tee to get two files (things I wrote and things Junglemonkey wrote), but there’s still a manual sorting that will have to happen, with the bulk of the work not being mine. I think I can come up with a nice looking interface that shows the list of all the records and, for whatever record is currently selected, the post’s text and author. Then the user can assign the post to one of the destination blogs. When that’s all done, the program can then output the three WXS files and we can try to import them. If this all works, I’ll probably share the app somehow.