- Syndicate Your Blog with RSS
- Other Useful Tools
- Backing Up Your Data
- Migrating Your Blog
- Importing from Another Blog
- Summary
Importing from Another Blog
If you have set up a blog on another site, WordPress allows you to import the content from that blog using the Tools, Import feature (see Figure 7.10). You can import from several other blogging platforms (including other WordPress sites).
Figure 7.10 The Import subpanel allows you to import your blog data from another location.
Currently, it is possible to import your content from the following blogs:
- Blogger
- Blogli
- Israblog
- LiveJournal
- Movable Type or TypePad
- Posterous
- Vox
- WordPress
- Yahoo! 360
Each import tool walks you through the specific steps to import your data from your old blog to your new one. Follow the onscreen instructions for your particular situation. The importer is used only to retrieve the content. It does not import any themes, images, or media files you may have had on your other blog. In some cases, the importer brings in only posts and comments (Blogger). When you import from another WordPress blog, you can restore posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.
In addition, you can also import links and convert WordPress tags to categories and vice versa using Tools, Import.
Importing from Blogger, TypePad, or LiveJournal might seem like a logical thing to do if you are just getting set up with a WordPress blog; however, the WordPress option might not seem like an obvious choice at first. There are a few reasons why you might choose this option:
- Restoring a previous backup of your blog. Some people like to have two sites. The first is a public site that they want highly available, often called a production site. The second is a sandbox (or development) site where they can make changes without the public noticing. After they have made the necessary changes in development, they can promote the changes quickly from the development site to the production site. Periodically, they might want to refresh the information in development with the more current information in production. This is done by first creating an export file (covered later in this lesson) and then using the import to update the development site.
- Migrating from the WordPress.com to WordPress.org site. You might find that WordPress.com's features are too constraining and you would like to host your own blog. Similar to the preceding scenario, you import an existing WordPress export file to bring over the content. To learn more about how to migrate your blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, read the sections "Backing Up Your Data" (to export your blog data) and "Importing Data from a WordPress Export," earlier in this lesson.
- Renaming your blog. You might find at some point that your blog name and URL do not match the brand of content you are providing. You cannot rename the WordPress.com URL, but you can register a new blog and migrate the information from your old blog to your new blog.