2008 Jul 22
Many Dotclear 1.2 users didn't dare to upgrade to Dotclear 2 during its beta cycle, and some of them switched to another blog engine to try something new. They often chose Wordpress, which is not surprising considering that Dotclear and Wordpress have many features in common.
These common features make switching from one to the other easy, and as the final version will soon be released, we decided to help Wordpress users who would be interested in switching to Dotclear to easily import their data into a brand new Dotclear blog.
The import/export native plugin now features a new module: Import from Wordpress. All you have to do is provide the database connection details. The import process is fully automated and keeps you informed of its progression.
How can I help?
The module worked flawlessly on a blog containg over 1000 posts and several thousands comments. Every hosting provider is a special cas, though, so you're kindly invited to test the module and let us know any issue you may encounter.
Remarks
Dotclear and Wordpress have many common features but they're also different on e few aspects, and some information had to be adapted. We strongly recommend you check the permissions of the imported uses as the two applications don't have the same permission systems.
Also, in Wordpress you can assign several categories to a single post, while Dotclear chose the other way and a post can only be in one category. So you choose how categories should be imported: you can choose (or not) to import one category per post, and you can choose (or not) to skip the first category (which stands for “no category” on a default Wordpress installation). Finally, you can choose (or not) to import multiple categories as tags.
This module was developed to import a 2.6 version of Wordpress and it might not work on earlier releases. But it's highly probable that it works with any 2.x version.
Please feel free to let us know your comments and suggestions.
Comments
Olivier,
Do you plan to add support for reading WXR files? Note WXRs have a bug: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/76...
Also, I hope this works for importing multiple WP blogs into separate DC blogs -- I will try soon.
why don't you allow to add a post into several categories?
Because we chose once and for all to stick to the "one drawer, several tags" paradigm. The category is the drawer.