Support » Fixing WordPress » Movable type – did not export, just copied dir – how to import?

  • Hi-

    I installed WP and it was as easy as everyone said it was going to be. Now, I am trying to get my old entries from a backup of a MT3 installation. Important: I did not use the export feature of MT, and the server has since been wiped out do it is not possible for that to be done now. I just copied the directories to my local PC to back them up.

    How do I import them into WordPress? I’d really appreciate the assistance.

    Thanks!

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
  • That’s likely going to be a problem that someone who’s a whiz with databases is going to have to deal with….

    What does your database backup from MT look like? Is it normal mysql? (I’ve no clue, never used anything but WP….)

    Thread Starter mouthybroad

    (@mouthybroad)

    I don’t even know how to answer that question – I did not have access to a mysql gui on the server, the few things I did to set up the database originally (a couple of years ago) was by command line. This sounds like a dumb question, but what is the file extension for the mysql files, db?

    Thanks for replying so quickly.

    If you have a mysql database on your drive, it should be *.sql, or maybe *.sql.gz if it wound up gzipped (happens sometimes with large dbs).

    Thread Starter mouthybroad

    (@mouthybroad)

    This is bad, but I don’t see any .sql files at all. A bunch that end in .db and .idx in the db dir, but none that look like sql is involved.
    Am I sol?

    Thanks!

    Well, I don’t know if this will help much. But it’s all I can offer – so maybe you can accomplish it with a bit of work.

    I *just* converted my MT blog to WordPress the day before yesterday, and I *did* use the export feature that MT gives you. Basically, when you do that, it opens a new browser window and has everything in a nice TXT format for you to copy, paste into Notepad and save. Then it was an easy upload to WordPress – took me all of 5 minutes.

    Since you can’t export anymore, perhaps you could go through your files that you saved and convert them into the format the WordPress can read. This’ll be some work on your part – especially if it’s a long-running blog (mine was all the way back to 2002). But if it helps…

    Basically, it started with the very first post, and the newest one was the last in the file. The format looked like so:

    AUTHOR: Shelly
    TITLE: I’m Back!
    STATUS: Publish
    ALLOW COMMENTS: 2
    CONVERT BREAKS: 1
    ALLOW PINGS: 0

    DATE: 09/27/2002 10:58:04 PM
    —–
    BODY:
    post text here
    —–
    EXTENDED BODY:

    —–
    EXCERPT:

    —–
    KEYWORDS:

    —–

    ——–
    AUTHOR: Shelly
    TITLE: Glitches
    STATUS: Publish
    ALLOW COMMENTS: 2
    CONVERT BREAKS: 1
    ALLOW PINGS: 0

    DATE: 09/28/2002 01:34:31 PM
    —–
    BODY:
    post text here
    —–
    EXTENDED BODY:

    —–
    EXCERPT:

    —–
    KEYWORDS:

    —–
    COMMENT:

    I showed you two of them so you could see how the line breaks and stuff worked between each post. I also lef tthe dates and times so you could see how those were formatted. You will also notice the pings, trackbacks and stuff – and notice that if there is no comment on the page, then there’s no spot for it to appear.

    If there’s comments, they will look like this:

    COMMENT:
    AUTHOR: Shelly
    EMAIL: email address here
    IP: IP address here
    URL: commenter’s URL here
    DATE: 09/28/2002 06:40:14 PM
    just a test 🙂
    —–

    and there’s two line breaks between the —– at the end of the comment and the next post.

    All of it was saved in a single TXT file and imported to WordPress no problem. I know it sucks, but hopefully that helps!

    Thread Starter mouthybroad

    (@mouthybroad)

    That is actually incredibly helpful, thank you. Once I realized that I did not have the import file I knew it was going to be kind of an excruciating process, but what you are suggesting is not as bad as I feared.

    I’ll work on it tonight and hit you up with more questions, I am sure. Thanks so much!

    Thread Starter mouthybroad

    (@mouthybroad)

    That worked so perfectly I want to lie down and cry. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it!

    -mb

    Good, I’m glad it worked out for ya 🙂 I’m sure it was a ton of work converting it all over, but it was better than nothing, I suppose 🙂

    just an FYI, for future readers/searchers. I had to do an import of a VERY large MT site into WP (the MT/TP site was over 11,400 posts/pages). The MT export didn’t want to work (kept hanging) for that large a site, so I wrote a set of perl scripts to extract the needed data from both or either the SQL dumps or directly from the MT/TP html pages, then write it to a properly formatted WP import file. If anyone needs the scripts, please feel free to contact me.

    Maybe someday if I have time I’ll post them to my site.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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