WordPress importer

This page is used to coordinate the development of the WordPress importer. For documentation see WordPress importer.

Supported versions

The script might work with other versions but it will be developed/tested with the following versions of each software:

• Tiki 7.x
• WordPress 3.0.1
  (known to work also on 2.8.4, at least)

What should be imported?

A list of WordPress information that we want to import to Tiki.

• posts
• pages
• posts and pages attachments
• posts and pages comments
• tags and categories

Post and page content

WordPress store post and page content in HTML. So the idea is to import it to Tiki as HTML instead of converting the content to our wiki syntax. Unfortunately, with this approach some stuff listed below will not work. Maybe in the future we can parse those cases and convert them into a syntax that Tiki understand. But this is not planned for the first version of the importer.

• apart from the extended syntax (WordPress calls them shortcodes) mentioned in the section below, it also use an special syntax for image caption (tag [caption])
• links to internal content will stop working since link naming conventions are different among the two softwares. For example, if you have a post called "Tiki Fest Montreal 5" in WordPress the link will be something like /2010/06/25/tiki-fest-montreal-5/ and in Tiki blogpost38-Tiki-Fest-Montreal-5. Note that this only refers to manually created links inside one post content pointing to another post.

Attachments

The easiest way to import the attachments is to download them from the original website but this means that the original website must be reachable from the Tiki installation that is running the importer.

In the XML file we have the link to all the attachments, so with those links we can download and add them to a file gallery specifically created for the importation.

Users

It is possible to export WordPress users using WP Export Users plugin and than import them to Tiki using batch import users feature. Anyway probably most WordPress installations are a single blog with a single (or just a few users) so it is easy to handle this part manually.

Known issues

Moved to http://doc.tiki.org/WordPress+importer#Known_issues

Todo list

• documentation with explanation on how to add "months links" and "freetags" modules and link to "Easy blog" profile.
• some more information/checkboxes shown to the user:
  • differences between tiki blogs and Wp message to the tiki admin: like comments , which can be enabled per post in wp, but only globally (per blog?) in tiki. Offer the tiki admin the option to change this global setting to on or off for all the blog posts
  • after the importation is successfull, show the tiki admin a link to apply "Easy Blog" profile, as well as Wysiwyg_6x (to easy wysiwyg in blogs), "collaborative wiki menu", to have a simple wiki page where he (or others, if he wants) can add widgets with PluginTHML, and/or tell him/her how to manually add some modules, etc. (some tips for the blogger comming from wordpress...)

Ideas for future versions of the Importer

• Parse [caption] shortcode and replace it with Tiki equivalent syntax ({IMG} wiki plugin wiki caption attribute). This necessarily include replacing the <img> (and sometimes <a>) tag inside the [caption] with {IMG}.
• Parse WordPress shortcodes for videos (Youtube, Vimeo, etc) and replace with Tiki equivalent syntax.
• Refactor Tiki Importer to improve the user feedback while running the importer. Maybe using a progress bar like http://jqueryui.com/demos/progressbar/. This might also include changing the importer to run on several requests instead of a single one, to make it easier to import big files (less chance of hitting any PHP limit, like timeout and others).

Related links

• WordPress Export Base Class
• WxF API (WordPress eXtended Format)
• Moving my blog from WordPress to Django; Part 2: Migrating the data
• Import WordPress Blog into Drupal with Users from Comments
• WordPress import module for Drupal