Importing Content to WordPress

WordPress currently supports importing data in the form of posts (articles) and most of the details or features supported by the content publishing platform. Three major platform of publishing online are Blogger, Live Journal and MSN Live Space. Importing content form these places to WordPress is discussed in this tutorial.

Users of WordPress 2.2 and above can import from Blogger. Earlier versions cannot import from Blogger because “New Blogger” was released by Google, invalidating all the old importers. Only WordPress 2.2 and later has support for “New Blogger”.  If you haven’t already, you must be using New Blogger and a Google Account on Blogger. If you are still using Old Blogger, the importer will not work, but there is a helpful online tool that converts legacy Blogger Atom exports into WordPress WXR export files. To start the Blogger importer, go to Tools and select Blogger from the import option. From there users can important the content present on the blogger to their WordPress account. Similarly, to import form Live Journal, go to LiveJournal option from the import option. If, however, you can’t use the current API-based importer for some reason, you need to do the following:

– Grab an older importer file.

– Save the file as livejournal.php and replace the one in /wp-admin/import/.

– Go to Manage → Import → LiveJournal.

– Export LiveJournal contents in XML format.

Now to important the content from Live Space. Although there isn’t any native way to import content from Live Space to WordPress, there are a couple of ways by which you can undertake this task. One of the ways is to use a Python script but there is another way by which you don’t need to understand and write that code. With this way, instead of writing a complex Python code, you only need to download and install a simple Python code known as Beautiful Soap. Python’s version 3.06, as specified in Live Space Mover instructions, works perfect for this purpose. You would need to modify the date parameters in the code otherwise it can create problems. After that, you would need to change you Live Spaces theme to “Journey”. And with that a WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) file is generated which includes all posts, comments, and categories from your Live Spaces blog. Now go to your WordPress blog and select import from the wp-admin site. You might have to spend some time verifying each blog post and updating any post links with links to previous posts to now point to sev17. This would complete the process of importing content form Live Space.