Importing from Wordpress

If you have a Wordpress site already, you can export an XML archive very easily. Go into the administration panel and choose “Tools > Export”. Keep the “All content” option selected, and hit the “Download export file” button.

Now create a new PieCrust website and import that archive:

chef init myblog
cd myblog
chef import wordpress-xml /path/to/archive.xml

This will create all the pages, posts, and metadata in the current PieCrust website.

Be aware of the following caveats however:

  • The import process will edit the current website’s configuration file to set some properties on it, like the website’s title and list of authors.

  • At the moment, only content is imported, not themes and templates and such. Although it may be technically possible to do so, many Wordpress themes come with commercial licenses which could potentially prevent converting it.

  • Because Wordpress stores its pages’ contents in raw HTML, you won’t get nice Markdown or Textile syntax from the import process.

  • PieCrust will import any attachments to pages or posts (images, etc.). This means it will make requests to the original URLs of those attachments in order to download them. If your Wordpress website was taken down, PieCrust won’t be able to download anything and you’ll be missing things from the imported website.

  • If you had comments in your Wordpress blog, they will be lost. You can however import those comments in a service like Disqus, and then use Disqus on your PieCrust website.