moving from mephisto to wordpress – as smoothly as possible

After ten years of supporting and switching between up-and-coming blog software, Naked Ink has finally made the move to WordPress. I was looking for an active, knowledgeable community, and WordPress seems to shine in this area. The only way this community has not been a boon (so far) is in making the move from Mephisto. The posts about making the transition are scattered and often incomplete. What I did find, however, is collected here in the hopes that it will save some poor soul hours of white-knuckled hair-pulling.

Importing from RSS (even doing the ole Atom to RSS conversion) was not going to cut it. I wanted all of my posts and pages, in their categories, with all of the comments intact.

The first big break I got was when Fred B, over at geekThang, pointed me toward a python script that would get the job done.

m2wp.py is a godsend from schwuk that promised to transform my Mephisto db into something WordPress importable. The only problem: it’s designed for PostgreSQL databases. While there have been many convincing arguments made about the superiority of PostgreSQL, it seems like MySQL is the standard in shared hosting.

Thankfully, Jason Morrison ran into the same snag and did up this little number, a diff patch to fix up the python script for use with MySQL. Unfortunately, the patch ends prematurely.

After some fiddling, I found myself with m2wp-mysql.py – a python script that will do exactly what we need.

If you’ve got MySQL set up, access to python, and the MySQLdb plugin on your server, you are good to go. Just run:

python m2wp-mysql.py -h

You’ll be up and running WordPress in no time (the -h simply lists the prompts you need to fill in for the script to connect to your db). Hop onto your WordPress installation, hit the import tab – format: WordPress, select the output file from m2wp-mysql.py, and away you go.

If you’re missing one of the above, it can get tricky.

My host had MySQL set up (of course), as well as Python, but no Python-MySQL integration. Boo. Solution: export my entire Mephisto database, install all of the necessary components on my desktop, import the mysqldump, carry on as normal.

Depending on your setup you’ll may need to head to mysql.com, python.org, and/or sourceforge. If you’ve understood any of what was going on so far, installing the appropriate components to do this on your own system shouldn’t be too hard.

Once you’re in WordPress, you’ll notice that all of your drafted posts have now been published. Other than that (and maybe some problems with tag/category crossovers) everything should be shiny.

Tested with Mephisto .8 and WordPress 2.5.1.

Good luck, and make backups!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 3:45 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.