Wayne Moran Photography Blog

How to convert a Typepad.com blog to a WordPress blog

I have been blogging for a very long time at the Questions and Answers blog www.qandablog.com that is hosted via typepad.com. But I have known for a very long time that,
1. I wanted to be working in WordPress, the most popular Content Management System (CMS) in the world, so that I can easily help my clients with their web pages and blogs etc
2. From a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, it is much better to be blogging at your main domain, in this case www.waynemoran.com so that you are driving traffic to your domain and not the generic typepad.com domain.
So yesterday I realized that my hosting company (www.gate.com ) had all three of the top blogging engines available in the easy scripts section of the web site. They have Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress and as I have been talking with a client recently who has a need for Moodle, which is a CMS for educational provider websites, I realized my provider has that tool also.

Anyway, I decided to turn on WordPress for my sight. That process was easy but then I immediately broke out in a cold sweet thinking how in the world am I going to get all my content from my last blog over to this new blog? I woke up at 3:30 last night thinking, yes worrying about this. Gosh there has to be a way to convert this. So early this morning I ran off to Google and searched for “convert from typepad to wordpress” and shazam I found this awesome post from www.blogstrategies.net
http://www.blogstrategies.net/2009/01/28/import-typepad-to-wordpress/

So I went to my Typepad blog and logged in.
I went to the help page http://www.typepad.com/account/help and searched for export which points you to this page http://help.typepad.com/import_export.html and under the Export Section I found this little point

To create an export file, go to Blogs > Settings > Import/Export and scroll down to the Export section. Click the Export button to generate the export file.
I saved the file locally as mt- export.txt. This is important for later. Then I ftp uploaded this file to my new blog directory on my web host under the new directory wp-content.
In the article above it says to
“Next, sign-in to WordPress, click Tools in the left sidebar and Import. Select Movable Type/Typepad. Choose the second option for importing – “Or use mt-export.txt in your /wp-content/directory.” Click Import, and give WordPress a few moments to do its magic, and import and convert the data.”

Well, being I am on a slightly newer version of WordPress things are a little bit different. When you go to the Import menu on the left of the form you 1st have to install the import script or at least I did in my environment. I selected
Movable Type and TypePad: Import posts and comments from a Movable Type or TypePad blog.

When I did that, it gave me a warning that this script as not been tested with this newer version of WordPress so I stopped for a moment. But being the intrepid developer that I am I decided to continue on. Once it is installed you get to choose to upload a file from your computer or import mt-export.txt. This is where the ftp file from above is important. I selected this second option and off it goes.

In a minute or so I get the message Converted 1279 posts. Wow, now this is awesome! It has saved me hundreds of hours.

You can see the results here http://www.waynemoran.com/blog2/

Now I still need to work on the design and make sure it is getting into Google and all that but to know that I have quickly converted the content is a huge miracle.

So thanks for the info and happy blogging!!