Comments on: Exporting-Importing A Category

By: Mosh

Mosh — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:43:11 +0000

Honestly, I wish I had the time. I’ve never developed a plugin, but yes - this looks like an ideal task to work at. Sadly, I’ve got 3 weeks left on my contract, 20+ PCs to rebuild (very slow, old ones - one at a time), and 5 months’ of work to document for whoever takes over.

After that I’m off travelling again. I almost wish I was sat somewhere I could work at this!

By: Jeff Rothe

Jeff Rothe — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:10:28 +0000

I also had looked high and low at one time to export a certain category of posts out of Wordpress. I came across the HandySolo method, but the other method of changing the author is helpful albeit a pain.

Seriously, it sounds like technically it could be difficult to make a plugin that would export / import individual categories, or integrate it into the core, but this is a feature that would see a ton of use.

Maybe some brave sole will attempt it in your Wordpress plugin contest running over the next two months. I have to belive a developer willing to make this as a plugin would have a good chance of winning if they did.

By: Megapixels

Megapixels — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:15:42 +0000

An import SQL wouldn’t be that tough, once you have the export. I usually worry that I’m not getting (and sending) all the pieces. Once you’ve got that figured out, the SQL is trivial.

By: Kulpreet Singh » Top 5 Wordpress Wish List

Kulpreet Singh » Top 5 Wordpress Wish List — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:06:08 +0000

[...] & Exporting not just by author, but by category, or time range, or tag. Today there was a an interesting post by Jeff Chandler on the long way to export by category. However, a simple plugin would be awesome. [...]

By: Mosh

Mosh — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:04:02 +0000

@Charles: And another good point! The plug-in would have to be *import* as well as export. Dropping data from a database is simple enough, and you can dump it into a text file of whatever format (plain text, XML, whatever). But you’re right - whatever you use to import it back in must understand that format.

Databases I do know, SQL I’m passingly familiar with, PHP is where I fall over and specific WordPress code… barely a beginner! But this *would* make a decent project, as I said. Worst case, you can use something scary like myPHPadmin to drop and reload the data but I’d recommend against in unless you really know what you’re doing

By: Charles

Charles — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:34:59 +0000

@Mosh:I think your method is direct, but I have a question. If you use sql to export the posts from database directly, how can you import this file(i don’t know what the db export exactly) to another weblog powered by WP?

By: Mosh

Mosh — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:34:38 +0000

I wish I had the time to sit down and try to figure out plug-ins. This would be a good one to start on as a project. if I ever get the chance, you’ll be the first to know!

By: SEO Web Designer Binh Nguyen

SEO Web Designer Binh Nguyen — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:18:15 +0000

This remind me of the problem with WPMU Category. Not only that by default you can’t edit the category slug. But also when you want to modify the slug or name you will face troubles. So I wrote How to Change WPMU Category Name or Slug

By: Jeff Chandler

Jeff Chandler — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:31:08 +0000

@NewMexiKen I would love to see the exporter obtain many of those exporting options you described and I think it’s only a matter of time before those are added. As for the character corruption problem, I don’t know. I would look through the bug tracker for WordPress and see if thats been reported or look through the support forums. If you don’t see anything written about it, you might want to submit a bug report

@Peter Murray Peter, you are spot on. When I reformatted my WordPress install and went the WXR route, it numbered all of my tags, comments, and post IDs, it was actually really annoying.

@Mosh I’m no plugin or SQL magician myself which is why I came up with this mundane solution that end user’s shouldn’t have a problem executing. I don’t think creating a plugin for this type of functionality would be difficult at all, keeping up with the development of the core of WordPress would probably be the most difficult aspect of it.

By: Siddharth

Siddharth — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:19:59 +0000

Nice find

By: Mosh

Mosh — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:46:46 +0000

The SQL to do this export wouldn’t be too difficult, especially with WordPress being nicely designed with only a small number of tables. If you’ve got access to the database directly with something like PHPMySQL then it’d be relatively simple to draft up a few queries (or one slightly more complex one) to drop the data out.

I’m no expert (honestly, I’m not!), but I honestly think this is an easy task from that point of view. I know next to nothing about coding plug-ins however… There are far more complex works out there. If someone sees the need, I can see this being a relatively simple plug-in to write.

The most difficult thing to keep on top of is the change in schema/structure of the WP database between versions, and any additional meta data added by other plug-ins. Still, this could be handled.

Hmm. I forsee a project…

By: Peter Murray

Peter Murray — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:27:54 +0000

The real problem with the exporter, at least as I see it, is that an export-import process will renumber the IDs of the post and taxonomy records. There are a number of plugins out there that use IDs rather than slugs (as I found when I was updating earlier this year), and they break horribly when this happens.

By: Jenny

Jenny — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:21:23 +0000

Awesome thanks. It’s exactly what I was looking for.

By: kim

kim — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:09:56 +0000

thanks for that info…it helps me with one problem i’ve been trying to figure out…and WXR file exceeds the limit…

By: NewMexiKen

NewMexiKen — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:31:34 +0000

I agree, this would be a nice feature — to export by category. To export by date would be an even better feature. Indeed, it is nearly an essential feature if you have a large number of posts and the WXR file exceeds the limit on import file size.

I have a somewhat related question. I find that the WXR file corrupts many characters — em dashes, latin letters, etc. Why is this? How can it be corrected? Anyone know?