Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

Ok, seems like a a bit of progress is being made in creating migration scripts for migrating other blogs into quills. Tomster has written something to migrate from coreBlog (zope based blog software) to quills and this has been included in the 0.9 branch of quils.

This got me thinking (always the thinking and never the actually doing eh?). What would be more useful than a blogworks xml to quills migration script would be a (insert very popular blooging software here) to quills migration script. Therefore maybe what I should write is a blogworks xml to (insert very popular blogging software here) script first which would benefit other frustrated blogworks users, then a script from that app to quills, to help people move to quills.

2 birds with one stone. or … actually 2 birds with 2 stones, but hey who’s counting right?Anyway, did a bit of googling and found this, and also elsewhere on that site some stuff about using rss feed of all posts to import into wordpress. There may be other stuff out there too - will keep looking and keep you informed…

UPDATE It certainly is easy to migrate from blogworks xml to wordpress, especially if like me you never got round to enabling comments. I did it last night in about ten minutes - these are the steps:-

1. Install wordpress somewhere (php/mysql required) using the "famous five minute install"
2. In blogworks xml, go to settings and change your "display last x posts" setting to 1000 or some other setting higher than your total number of posts
3. optionally change the file name of your RSS feed to something like export.xml so that you don’t cause chaos with people who have subscribed to your existing feed.
4. go to the "publish" dialogue and deselect all but the RSS, and click publish.
5. download the resulting xml file or move it somewhere that php can get at it
6. look at the read-me included with word press - there is a file called import-rss.php - run it and follow the instructions - it will pull in all the posts in the RSS feed and create them as wordpress entries.

I now have a wordpress version of hypothecate running locally ready to attempt a wordpress to quills import script

UPDATE 2 a couple more hurdles crossed - a while back I got Z Mysql adapter working on mac osx but hadn’t actually tried connecting, so got this sorted. Plus I also learnt how to create an external method. Then I started butchering Tomsters coreblog2quills script (linked above) to use a simple database query that returns post title, date and text of the posts stored in the wordpress database. I haven’t done anything with comments/categories yet, as hypothecate hasn’t currently got any.

Anyway, it appears to be working, but still have a couple of issues:-

1. If I import, for example, 10 posts, the first one comes in fine and the rest appear to have their content set to text/plain so that embedded HTML turns up encoded on the resulting page. If I go and resav each of those posts and select text/html in the pull-down, all is fine. but obviously I don’t want to do that for 217 posts.

2. The idea of this is that posts are created as drafts and when published, the quills machinery creates them in the appropriate archive, using the effective date set in the script - this seems to work fine if I do them individually, but If I bulk select them and change state state, they all get set to the same date - not sure why…

on top of this I am still using an older version quills from svn so should probably upgrade to the most recent before doing any more investigation.