I'm considering moving my blogging activity to Calepin. Here are the steps I've taken so far to bring my content from wordpress into plaintext (markdown) files that Calepin can render.

Export Wordpress Content #

1. Tools->Export
2. All content
3. Download Export File

Now you have an XML file with all your content.

Convert Wordpress to Markdown #

ExitWP is designed to export markdown in a format that Jekyll understands. For example, it puts metadata into a YAML header:

--- author: bentsai date: '2008-06-17 17:33:23' layout: post slug: collaborating-with-mercurial status: publish title: Collaborating with Mercurial wordpress_id: '26' categories: - technology tags: - collaboration - hg - mercurial ---

The first time I ran ExitWP, I got a parse error. I deleted the offending line and got another parse error. I deleted that line, and the export was successful. It generated a directory full of .markdown files, with the date and slug for the filename (2008-06-17-collaborating-with-mercurial.markdown).

Remaining steps #

• Edit exitwp.py to output the metadata in the Calepin format.
• Rerun the script.
• Manually edit any anomalies from the export.
• Copy images from wordpress to a public Dropbox folder.
• Re-link the images.
• Export comments

References #

• Blogging With Octopress
• Why I've Migrated to Octopress
• Switching to the Octopress Blogging Engine