Exitwp

Exitwp is tool for making migration from one or more wordpress blogs to the jekyll blog engine as easy as possible.

By default it will try to convert as much information as possible from wordpress but can also be told to filter the amount of data it converts.

The latest version of these docs should always be available at https://github.com/thomasf/exitwp

Getting started

• Download or clone using git clone https://github.com/thomasf/exitwp.git
• Export one or more wordpress blogs using the wordpress exporter under tools/export in wordpress admin.
• Put all wordpress xml files in the wordpress-xml directory
• Special note for Wordpress 3.1, you need to add a missing namespace in rss tag : xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
• Run xmllint on your export file and fix errors if there are.
• Run the converter by typing python exitwp.py in the console from the directory of the unzipped archive
• You should now have all the blogs converted into separate directories under the build directory

Runtime dependencies

• Python 2.6, 2.7, ???
• html2text : converts HTML to markdown (python)
• PyYAML : Reading configuration files and writing YAML headers (python)
• Beautiful soup : Parsing and downloading of post images/attachments (python)

Installing dependencies in ubuntu/debian

sudo apt-get install python-yaml python-bs4 python-html2text

Installing Python dependencies using python package installer (pip)

From the checked out root for this project, type:

sudo pip install --upgrade -r pip_requirements.txt

Note that PyYAML will require other packages to compile correctly under ubuntu/debian, these are installed by typing:

sudo apt-get install libyaml-dev python-dev build-essential

Using Vagrant for dependency management

In the event your local system is incompatible with the dependencies listed (or you'd rather not install them), you can use the included Vagrantfile to start a VM with all necessary dependencies installed.

1. Lint and place all wordpress xml files in the wordpress-xml directory as mentioned above
2. In the directory of the unzipped archive, run vagrant up.
3. SSH to your Vagrant VM using vagrant ssh
4. Run cd /vagrant to open the VM's shared folder
5. Run the converter from the VM by typing python exitwp.py
6. After the converter completes, exit the SSH session using exit
7. You should now have all the blogs converted into separate directories under the build directory
8. Important: Once satisfied with the results, run vagrant destroy -f to shut down the VM and remove the virtual drive from your local machine

Configuration/Customization

See the configuration file for all configurable options.

Some things like custom handling of non standard post types is not fully configurable through the config file. You might have to modify the source code to add custom parsing behaviour.

Known issues

• Target file names are some times less than optimal.
• Rewriting of image/attachment links if they are downloaded would be a good feature
• There will probably be issues when migrating non utf-8 encoded wordpress dump files (if they exist).

Other Tools

• A Gist to convert WP-Footnotes style footnotes to PHP Markdown Extra style footnotes: https://gist.github.com/1246047