Migrating WordPress Blog to Tumblr
April 7, 2012 5:44 PM Subscribe
I have a self-hosted WordPress blog in which every post is an image (with alt-text) and a single comment. I'd like to move this material over to a Tumblr blog. The site has two years' worth of material, with about three posts per week.
I've done a Google search and it seems there are three methods for migrating WordPress content to Tumblr. All involve exporting the WordPress Blog to XML first, which I've done.
1) This PHP script. Only thing is, it doesn't work well. I tried it on the large XML file and got only about 1/4 of the posts. When I tried it on a small sample of the XML file (3 posts) only one came up. I don't know if Tumblr is throttling it or what. Still, it's worked the best out of the three, so if I can get past the issues, it may be the solution.
2) The Blogger method. A few sites suggest going through Blogger, but the tool for converting WordPress XML to Blogger also ignores most of the posts, when it works at all.
3) This ruby script. It just gave me a bunch of errors, and with no ruby knowledge on me, I was stuck there.
There must be some way to do this. Anyone had success with this in the past?
1) This PHP script. Only thing is, it doesn't work well. I tried it on the large XML file and got only about 1/4 of the posts. When I tried it on a small sample of the XML file (3 posts) only one came up. I don't know if Tumblr is throttling it or what. Still, it's worked the best out of the three, so if I can get past the issues, it may be the solution.
2) The Blogger method. A few sites suggest going through Blogger, but the tool for converting WordPress XML to Blogger also ignores most of the posts, when it works at all.
3) This ruby script. It just gave me a bunch of errors, and with no ruby knowledge on me, I was stuck there.
There must be some way to do this. Anyone had success with this in the past?
A WordPress export typically does *not* include the images. Are you intending on leaving the images on your WP server or do you want to import them to tumblr-native uploads?
posted by artlung at 10:52 AM on April 9, 2012
posted by artlung at 10:52 AM on April 9, 2012
Additionally, the PHP script you used interfaces with the tumblr api - and it also looks like it writes out about success or failure - did the log generated by the PHP script reflect what actually happened -
posted by artlung at 10:58 AM on April 9, 2012
echo "Success! Post ID: $result\n"; or echo "Error: $result\n";? If the messages didn't reflect the actual result, then that script is bad.posted by artlung at 10:58 AM on April 9, 2012
I recently had to move my photo blog from pixelpost to WP. I found this script and it worked perfectly the the person who wrote it was of great help in the stupid errors I kept making, perhaps he could be of assistance?
posted by silsurf at 11:28 PM on April 9, 2012
posted by silsurf at 11:28 PM on April 9, 2012
Response by poster: Okay, I have figured it out! Here's the scoop:
1) ferdinand.bardamu was correct. The first export didn't work right. I don't know why. Since, at the time, I had no idea what I was looking at with XML, I didn't notice, but after examining the code and experimenting I realized that the entries the script failed on had no actual content marked in them. I exported again and this time it was successful. No idea what I may have done differently the first time.
2) Once I had a decent export, the PHP script in method #1 worked like a charm, with only one minor problem and one major one. The minor problem was that, originally, the posts were made using WordPress' editor, and it does some things that normal HTML and XML doesn't really know what to do with (regarding captions on images). So I had to do some fiddling with the XML content to pretty things up.
3) The other issue is that Tumblr has a daily post limit, even through its API. Seems to be about 75 posts. Anticipating this, I had divvied up my XML into six parts, but the first one had 89 posts in it and I had to figure out which 14 didn't import (they weren't just the last 14). Now that I know what the limit is, I can adjust my XML chunks accordingly.
CAVEAT: the site I am converting was very simple stuff. Each post contained an image with alt/title text, a caption, and occasionally a line or two of text. No idea how this method works with more complex content.
Thanks for the help, everyone!
posted by Legomancer at 6:06 AM on April 10, 2012
1) ferdinand.bardamu was correct. The first export didn't work right. I don't know why. Since, at the time, I had no idea what I was looking at with XML, I didn't notice, but after examining the code and experimenting I realized that the entries the script failed on had no actual content marked in them. I exported again and this time it was successful. No idea what I may have done differently the first time.
2) Once I had a decent export, the PHP script in method #1 worked like a charm, with only one minor problem and one major one. The minor problem was that, originally, the posts were made using WordPress' editor, and it does some things that normal HTML and XML doesn't really know what to do with (regarding captions on images). So I had to do some fiddling with the XML content to pretty things up.
3) The other issue is that Tumblr has a daily post limit, even through its API. Seems to be about 75 posts. Anticipating this, I had divvied up my XML into six parts, but the first one had 89 posts in it and I had to figure out which 14 didn't import (they weren't just the last 14). Now that I know what the limit is, I can adjust my XML chunks accordingly.
CAVEAT: the site I am converting was very simple stuff. Each post contained an image with alt/title text, a caption, and occasionally a line or two of text. No idea how this method works with more complex content.
Thanks for the help, everyone!
posted by Legomancer at 6:06 AM on April 10, 2012
Response by poster: Oh yes, to address artlung and add another caveat:
Tumblr did not import the images, merely pointed to them for displaying. I'll continue having to host the images myself, which is fine for my purposes.
posted by Legomancer at 6:10 AM on April 10, 2012
Tumblr did not import the images, merely pointed to them for displaying. I'll continue having to host the images myself, which is fine for my purposes.
posted by Legomancer at 6:10 AM on April 10, 2012
This thread is closed to new comments.
Now i'm not sure if if posterous does mass autoposting, and even if they do, tumblr might have some queing issues, it has that at times, still, posterous is said to handle data pretty well when migrating, worst case u'll end up clicking 350 times.
posted by Leon Backwards at 8:04 PM on April 7, 2012