[three]Bean

Migrating from wordpress

Feb 14, 2012 | categories: python, blogofile View Comments

I got fed up with wordpress and have moved to the python tool blogofile. I've been intermittently tending to my old blog over at http://threebean.wordpress.com/ and getting traffic I'm happy with. A lot of my old tutorials on tw2 regularly get referred to by google and my new posts get picked up by readers of planet python and occasionally by reddit.

WordPress has become unbearable:

I have to edit my posts in a clumsy WSIWYG editor.

My posts appear in planet aggregators without proper links back to my blog and half-truncated.

My control of styling and javascript is limited.

I can't embed github gists.

So I'm trying out blogofile:

It supports both reStructuredText and markdown out of the box.

My styling and layout are handled by mako templates which I use already elsewhere.

I can keep my posts in git.

I can host everything in one place on http://threebean.org

Along the way, I picked up this handy hack from zzzeek on getting syntax highlighting working in reST posts.

I also had to script something up with feedparser to parse my exported WordPress blog's and reimport it to blogofile. Here's what I wrote (It's based heavily on this example from the blogofile github repo:

#!/usr/bin/env python
""" WordPress (xml) -> blogofile.

Picks up an exported WordPress.com blog in XML format and builds a blogofile
``_posts`` directory out of it.
"""

import codecs
import feedparser
import os
import re
import yaml


def get_published_posts(filename):
    """ Generator over the posts in a wordpress.com XML dump. """

    d = feedparser.parse(filename)

    for entry in d['entries']:
        if entry.get('wp_attachment_url', None):
            pass
        elif entry.get('title', None) == 'About':
            pass
        else:
            yield entry


if __name__ == '__main__':
    #Output textile files in ./_posts
    if os.path.isdir("_posts"):
        print "There's already a _posts directory here, "\
                "I'm not going to overwrite it."
        sys.exit(1)
    else:
        os.mkdir("_posts")

    old_prefix = "http://threebean.wordpress.com/"
    new_prefix = "http://threebean.org/blog/"
    prepend_links = True

    post_num = 1
    for post in get_published_posts('wordpress-export.xml'):
        yaml_data = {
            "title": post['title'],
            "date": post['wp_post_date'].replace('-', '/'),
            "permalink": post['link'].replace(old_prefix, new_prefix),
            "categories": ", ".join([
                tag['term'].lower() for tag in post['tags']
            ]),
            "tags": ", ".join([
                tag['term'].lower() for tag in post['tags']
            ]),
            }
        fn = u"{0}-{1}.html".format(
                str(post_num).zfill(4),
                re.sub(
                    r'[/!:?\-,\']',
                    '',
                    post['title'].strip().lower().replace(' ', '_')
                )
        )

        content = post['content'][0]['value'].replace(u"\r\n", u"\n")

        if prepend_links:
            content = "<p>Originally posted at <a href='%s'>%s</a>.</p>" % (
                post['link'], post['link']) + content

        print "writing " + fn
        f = codecs.open(os.path.join("_posts", fn), "w", "utf-8")
        f.write("---\n")
        f.write(
            yaml.safe_dump(
                yaml_data,
                default_flow_style=False,
                allow_unicode=True
            ).decode("utf-8")
        )
        f.write("---\n")
        f.write(content)
        f.close()
        post_num += 1

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