Looking to import your Serendipity blog to WordPress?
You are out of luck. So far I had searched and found nothing. Three questions over the years in WordPress support forum met with no answer.
After holding back for a few months, I decided to hack things together and get my Serendipity blog entries into WordPress.
Before you try, make backup. You milage may varies.
My Serendipity version is 0.9.1. If you have other version let me know if it work for you.
First the idea.
- WordPress (wp) do not have a Serendipity (s9y) import. It does have a RSS2.0 import
- Serendipity has an full RSS feed export
So it looks like it is a simple export RSS in s9y and import RSS in wp. If only thing is so easy.
The problems:
- Although s9y says “Export full RSS feed”, it actually export the first part of a 2 parts post.
- s9y encode html tags < as & lt; and > as & gt;
wp however expect them to be un-encode and enclosed with CDATA[' '] - Time out well importing too big a rss file.
The solution:
- Fix the full export
In the file rss.php (in the root folder), find this line serendipity_printEntries_rss($entries, $version, $comments, $metadata['fullFeed'], $metadata['showMail']);before the line add$metadata['fullFeed'] = true;Go into Serendipity admin and click on Export entries.
Save the xml file - Fix the encoding
Open the xml file in a text editor (Try NotePad2)
Do a search and replace
& lt; with < & gt; with > - Fix the time out
At the top of wp-admin/admin.php
add set_time_limit(0);
Any suggestions on getting WP to import S9Y’s comments? All of my *posts* imported successfully, but none of the comments did.
Thanks!
Importing comments will need more work.
So I decided to drop all my old comments.
This actually doesn’t work with the latest and greatest from serendipity and wordpress. Too bad too…I really would like to move to wordpress but it seems I’m locked to serendipity since I have around 150 entries and 2 thousand comments. Guess I’ll have to make due.
I lose all my comments in the export file
Unfortunately yes … see comment above. I didn’t work on importing the comments
I would be interested in knowing why people want to move from s9y to Wordpress. I am about to move a blog from MT 2.64 to s9y, but I sometimes wonder if Wordpress would be better. I have s9y running, but I want to make a lot of template changes and changes to the calendar. I find the documentation confusing because some of it isn’t written by native speakers of English. I think s9y would be easier to run and easier to update. I can see I need to think carefully now about which system to import to.
Hi MM,
I can’t speak for others, but the reason I moved is that WordPress has a larger userbase and I can find solutions for it more than I can for s9y.
This was more than a year (or 2) back so I’m not sure how far s9y has come since then.
Good luck!
Thanks, Ken. I’m sure you’re right. I have had answers to everything so far - still need to change some things - but it worries me that most of them came from the developer, that is, just one person. The thought that I might lose my comments is worrying, so I imagine I’m stuck now - I moved to Serendipity a couple of days after posting the query. All my comments from four years of Movable Type imported correctly.