Improved WordPress to WordPress Importer

I’ve been playing around with importing WordPress blogs from one instance to another, and I’ve been frustrated by some of the default features of the built in WordPress to WordPress importer.

So, I’ve implemented a new version of the importer that has the following features:

• Attachments – This importer will download and “insert” the actual image files of an attachment record. So for example, if you’ve uploaded images to your WordPress blog, then they will be listed as attachments. The normal importer will store these records but no do anything with the actual image. So you basically end up with dead links. Not anymore. Now if the image is an attachment, the importer will attempt to download it and insert it into the new blog. All of this downloading happens on your server, so you don’t actually have the files download to your client machine.
• Links – Links to your own blog are remapped. This is particularly important for image links to attachments (obviously) or else the attachment feature described above would be pretty whacked! But it also applies to cross links between your own blog posts. Seems like an obvious feature right? I thought so. This also applies to internal ping backs.
• Spam Comments – For some reason the default importer decides to import comments tagged as spam. I guess I can imagine a few cases where this might make sense… but nah… I don’t think so. So this importer will discard any comments marked as spam.

Installation: Download the code from the link below. Rename the file to zappo_wordpress.php and place it in your wp-admin/import directory.

Download: You can get a copy of the code here.

Usage: Same as any other importer, go to Manage->Import. Enjoy.

By the way, I really only tested this on WordPressMu, but there isn’t anything about it that I would expect to fail on standalone WordPress. Feel free to report bugs if you see issues.

Hey Zappo – This thing is really chatty, what gives? Do you think you could make it not print out so much noise? – You

No. But you can. Enjoy! – Me

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