Migrating from Expression Engine to Wordpress, step by step
I know some might ask why would I import from EE to WP. Actually, I like the flexibility of desinging in WP, I like the plugins and the ease with which I can dispatch spam. In particular, I relocated in January and in 2 days off line, got hit by a spammer with 1000 spam comments. I was furious. Since I only have Core EE (that is the free version), I had no good spam tools. And I wasn’t about to shell out over $100 for the paid version for my personal blog. So for me, WP was the way to go.
The downside? EE has no “export” function for anything but templates. This is something that was not obvious and not easy to find an answer to - at least not the last time I tried, which was more than a year ago. You can easily import your RSS feed from EE to WP, but you lose all comments. Now I’ve had my mom blog since 2002 and made a lot of friends. I didn’t want to lose their comments - that’s like slighting them - so I had to find a better solution.
Here is the solution step by step:
1. Of course, back up your EE blog - critical files, database, and key templates.
2. Make sure you are suing EE 1.4.2 or later, if not, upgrade. Yea, I know it’s a pain, but why are you using such an old version?
3. Read the wiki here: EE Exporting Entries. Follow it verbatim closely. IT’S CRITICAL THAT YOU REMOVE ALL WHITESPACE FROM THE CODE THAT EE HAS ON THEIR SUPPORT FORUMS. No blanks or spaces at all, just keep the line breaks as is. Replace “default_site” with name of your weblog. Go to the index page and select “view rendered template”. If you cannot view the index page, you’ve probably misnamed it. Make sure your comments are there completey written out. If it’s ok, then do view source, save as the default name (index.php). Note that you can export a max of 999 entries. If you have more you’ll have to go back and do this more than once and limit to older entries.
4. In Wordpress, go to Import and click Movable Type. Browse to your file. If your admin name doesn’t match you will be prompted on how you’d like to fix that. Select import. The wait can take while if you have a lot of imports.
Check your entries to see if it’s done properly. It should be, using this method. If not, go back and check things like the file name you selected, the white space on your code, the weblog name, etc.
One hiccup I got was that not all of my categories imported properly. Some did, so I don’t understand why there was a mixup. My posts were also reversed numbered (yuck), but that’s a database issue I assume.
I hope this helps!!
