Migrating from DasBlog to WordPress

I finally made the jump and moved on from DasBlog. This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for sometime now. I’ve been on DasBlog for around 3 years and it was great. But now it was time to move on, try something else.

I choose WordPress. For any of those who may be interested, here is my summary version of a how to on migrating from DasBlog to Wordpress:

Migrating from DasBlog 1.9  to Wordpress 2.6.2

1. Setup a new WordPress blog
2. Exported data from DasBlog; posts,comments
3. Imported data to WordPress
4. Other stuff: Redirect old posts, Feedburner, Statcounter Statistics, Google Analytics, Google Webmasters tools, Google Adsense

Installing WordPress:
It included only a few steps suchs downloading WordPress installation, editing a configuration file, uploading all the files to a web server, opening up the install web page on the browser, and the next thing you know, WordPress is installed! You could say that I had the perfect experience of the famous 5 minute install. But if you get into trouble there is always help http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.

From my experience I’d advice to configure you’re desired permalink structure if you so wish to customize it. This should be done before importing the posts.

Exporting old blog data:
This was the tricky part, unfortunately the default WordPress installation does not come with an option to “Import posts, comments, users, and categories from DasBlog”. Yet.

Enter BlogML. The XML format for blog content. You could say that this is what made the migration possible.

I knew that it was possible to export all my blog data into a BlogML file. Merill did this sometime back when he migrated from DasBlog to BlogEngine.Net. Also, he’s now gone ahead and created a little windows app based on  Paul Van Brenk’s code to make things easier.

Imported data to WordPress:
Aaron lerch had done all the hard work by creating the import module for WordPress for BlogML. I downloaded its updated version that had been modified to work with WordPress 2.3 when Rob Walling migrated from Community Server to WordPress.

This did not however work exactly how I would have liked, but with a minor tweek here and there the import module to worked like a charm with the WordPress 2.6 installation I had. Here is the updated file (and the required XPath Class - XPath.class.php v 3.5)  for the BlogML to WordPress import module. All you need to do is to drop these files into the WordPress Imports directory (/wp-admin/import/).

During the WordPress installation phase I suggested that you configure your required permalink structure.Here is why, Aaron’s import script also gives you a CSV file with all the old permalinks and the corresponding new permalink. This file can be used to create all the 301 permanent redirects for all your previous posts.

Other Stuff:
Redirecting posts was easy because we’d already have a mapping of old permalink to new permalink from the previous step, I only needed to add these into my .htaccess file.

The other places that I needed to update to reflect this change of blog engine was in Feedburner; where I needed to update the feed URL and Google Webmasters Tools where I needed to submit a new site map and delete the old. WordPress has a nice plugin that would create a decent site map.

Then as the last step, I added all the Statistics, Analytics, Advert javascript codes.

..and with all that, here I am writing my very first post on WordPress.