How can I export from Drupal to Movable Type?

October 28, 2006 11:15 PM

How can I export all of the posts and comments from a Drupal story node into the Movable Type import format?

I have 600+ weblog entries in a Drupal installation that I need to move to Expression Engine, which will accept imports in the MT format.

I have read everything I can find on the Drupal, Movable Type and Expression Engine sites, support fora, wikii and still can't find a Brad-grokable way to make it happen. I can find a dozen or more ways of moving from MT to Drupal, but nothing vice versa.

Using the import/export module of Drupal gets me a little short of halfway there, as it exports in either a CVS or XML format that I might be able to coerce into the MT format, but it doesn't include comments and its got other issues that make me itch (exporting creation/modification dates as UNIX format, as one example, that would require translation before importing). There's another module called importexportapi that appears to be in development, but the beta version I downloaded doesn't seem to play nicely with my Drupal installation.

I'm at my wits' end and I'd rather like to finish this project without manually cutting and pasting hundreds of entries and comments. Hayalp!

posted by bradlands to computers & internet (5 comments total)

If you have database access, you can probably write a SQL query that gets what you want, export that into CSV and write a script that parses it into a format that MT likes.
posted by mphuie at 11:40 PM on October 28, 2006

Heh, thanks mphule. I probably should clarify: I just barely know what I'm talking about above. I do, in fact, have SQL database access but anything beyond the most basic manipulations of it (through a front-end of some sort) is beyond my ken. Ditto script-writing and parsing and the hey-hey-oy-glavin!
posted by bradlands at 12:01 AM on October 29, 2006

I don't think there is an official or easy way, still.

I did the conversion by hand, myself, back in 2002 - it basically entailed writing my own PHP script that dumped the entire database into Sixapart's format. It was about two hours of coding - but I had a few years of PHP under my belt at the time.

For reference, here's the MTImport docs.
posted by Remy at 7:25 AM on October 29, 2006

Actually, those are ancient. Try these.

Unfortunately, I can't help you because I don't know Drupal well enough.
posted by fooljay at 8:15 AM on October 31, 2006

Damn it, Jay! What ya good fer?

(Those are the docs I linked to in the question, by the way.)

Ah, well. The search for an answer continues.
posted by bradlands at 1:20 PM on October 31, 2006