Converting old Wordpress posts to Hugo

Step 1

Read the Migration: From Wordpress chapter of the blogdown book.

Step 2

Get all your wordpress posts into one XML: WP Admin - Tools - Export.

Step 3

Install Exitwp and its dependencies (pyyamp, beautifulsoup4, html2text):

git clone https://github.com/thomasf/exitwp.git
sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install pyyaml
sudo pip install beautifulsoup4
sudo pip install html2text

This worked on macOS¹ High Sierra - I already had python installed.

Step 4

Working in the directory that git clone created (exitwp):

• Put the Wordpress XML in the wordpress-xml directory.
• Run xmllint riinu_wordpress.xml, worked the first time for me and I didn’t get any errors (so not sure what the fix errors if there are would entail).
• Back in the exitwp folder, run python exitwp.py
• This created folders build/jekyll/riinudata.wordpress.com/_posts and the content looked like this:

• Move all these into exitwp/post folder.

Step 5

• Take a copy of https://github.com/yihui/oldblog_xml/blob/master/convert.R to clean these .markdown files up and ready for Hugo. I edited the first three lines, skipped the “Do not run if…” chunk as I’d already done that in Step 3, edited the authors = c(), did not run the very last chunk (local({if (!dir.exist...})).
• Move all of the files (now .md) into content/post of your blogdown repo. Build and voila!

Further modifications

Looks like most of my posts were converted like a charm, with nicely formatted code blocks and images. But I few things I noticed that I think I have to fix:

• GitHub gists are now displayed as links, will make those into code blocks (or embed them using a Hugo shortcodes.
• Most images show up perfectly, but some have gotten stuck in a code block, e.g. showing up as <img src="https://riinudata.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/rplot.png" alt="Rplot"/>. Will sort these

Overall I feared a lot worse and am super happy with the conversion experience. Took exactly 3 h.

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