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Steps to Migrate from dasBlog to Wordpress


I just moved my blog from dasBlog to Wordpress. I have been one of the first users of dasBlog. I started blogging in 2003 with BlogX by Chris Anderson. dasBlog is a spin off of BlogX and I moved to it soon. I have created many macros/plugins for dasBlog and was very happy with it.

But off late the development of dasBlog has some what stalled and no new features are being added. I also singed up for a PHP/Linux host for a different project. I though why not give Wordpress a shot. So far it has been very interesting. There are a huge number of themes, plugins… I am sure I am going to waste a lot of time trying things out. I have also started learning PHP…

Anyway here is how I migrated from dasBlog to Wordpress:

  1. Installed Wordpress. My web host, Bluehost, provides a very simple way to install wordpress.
  2. Back up posts and comments from dasBlog. I used this tool to convert dasBlog posts to BlogML. This was straightforward.
  3. For importing the posts I used a plugin originally created by Aaron lerch and updated by Kavinda. This was a bit tricky. My Wordpress install allowed uploads of only 2MB files. My BlogML file was about 3.8MB. Wow! I have about 1250 posts! So I had to split up my BlogML file into two. But there was more problems. I still could not import the file. Some memory errors. I do not know enough PHP to fix that. So I split up the BlogML file further and imported them one by one. I made sure I downloaded each of the permalinks.csv generated.
  4. Then I setup the redirects. This is why I saved the permalinks file before. The import plugin generated a CSV file with the old and new permalink. I made sure I set up the permalinks to my liking before the import. I converted this CSV to a .htaccess to do 301 redirects and added it to my site’s root folder.
  5. Now I just copied my contents folder from my dasBlog installations so that all the images and binary files still had the same URL.
  6. That’s it the migration was done. Well I did have to migrate some of my static pages manually and setup redirects…

I sure will post about my thoughts on Wordpress as I use it more.

Related posts:

  1. Migrated to Wordpress
  2. 18+ Wordpress Plugins I use
  3. Per-Category Themes in dasBlog
  4. DasBlog Vs. BlogX
  5. dasBlog Extra Macros

This entry was posted on February 20, 2009, 11:08 AM and is filed under General, Personal, Software, dasBlog. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  1. #1 by Aakash on February 25, 2009 - 6:22 AM

    Hi Vasanth, Are you happy with your decision.? I reached here after a long time. infact this is my first visit on your “wordpress blog”. even I wanted to move to some other blogging engine from dasblog.

  2. #2 by Vasanth Dharmaraj on February 25, 2009 - 7:01 AM

    @ Aakash
    Yes, I am very happy. Lots of themes, plugins… It is so easy to setup, upgrade….

  3. #3 by Wade on April 16, 2009 - 3:17 PM

    Vasanth – can you elaborate on how you did the redirects? Some more detail would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

  4. #4 by Making Web make Sense on April 16, 2009 - 10:25 PM

    Just to help – Redirects can be done by modifying .htaccess file.
    You have to do a 301 redirect to let Google crawlers know that the site has moved.

    .htaccess is a config file for PHP applications.

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