November 19, 2009 – 8:36 am
Expression Engine Rocks.
Wordpress Rocks.
Importing Wordpress into Expression Engine sucks.
Specializing in both has proven to be a great service to our clients – using Wordpress for the standard CMS/Blog sites, and Expression Engine for the more complex sites. But when a client comes to us with a Wordpress powered site or blog, and is ready to make the step towards Expression Engine, there’s always one problem.
There’s no tool readily available to import Wordpress into Expression Engine. We’re all for interoperability, so this is quite surprising (especially because importing content into Wordpress is so amazingly easy).
We’ve done all the research, read tons of blogs and discussion posts, and have figured out the simplest way to handle it.
- Log into your Wordpress blog (you’ll need Administrator privileges)
- Go to Tools–>Export
- Download the XML file.
- Google has built some amazing scripts for converting among different blog formats. Download it.
- Unzip it (to any directory)
- Open up a terminal (OK, yes I’m assuming you have OSX or Linux. You can easily do this through a command line in Windows as well, just go to Run and type in “cmd”)
- Go to the directory where you unzipped the Google converters
- Run bin/wordpress2blogger.sh [/path/to/wordpress.xml] > blogger-export.xml
- Run bin/blogger2movabletype.sh blogger-export.xml > mt_import.txt
- Upload mt_import.txt to your web server, ideally the root of your site.
- Open up EE, and go to Admin–>Utilities–>Import Utilities
- Click on Movable Type.
- Enter in the relative path to the file, ../mt_import.txt if you uploaded it to the root.
- Select the Weblog that you want to import into.
- Select from the dropdowns the appropriate target fields. One thing I should note: If you installed any third party extensions that add on different field types, they may not show up in this list. In my case, I had TinyMCE installed, so any ‘WYSIWYG’ fields didn’t show up as options. The solution to this is to temporarily change the Field Type to Textarea or something similar.
- Get a move on, and Import it!
It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s about the best method that’s out there right now. Some things I noticed:
- Images aren’t imported (aka, they’ll still be linking to your old site)
- Extra/Custom fields aren’t imported
- Tags aren’t handled
- Some formatting issues may occur
Hope this helps! Let me know if you come across an easier way!
September 30, 2009 – 1:48 pm
After integrating with Twilio for FixMyCityDC, I was looking for another opportunity to use their great API.
So, combined with data from NPR’s Station Finder API, and loading it on Google App Engine, I was able to create a phone number to allow people to call from wherever they may be at the time, type in their zip code, and get the frequencies of all the local NPR stations.
Dial (866) 456-5701
I’ll leave the phone number up for about a month. It costs me 5 cents every time someone makes a call, so I won’t be leaving it up forever!
And of course, like a good netizen, it’s open source over at github. My python is a bit rusty, but it works!
September 4, 2009 – 7:53 am
I’m happy to announce this morning that skeevisArts was given an Honorable Mention in the Apps for Democracy 2 competition.
The goal of the competition was to build applications that would tie into DC’s 311 API, which allows residents to submit work requests to the municipal government.
The winning team focused on building tools for iPhone and Facebook users, and built a technologically impressive product.
We went a different route – building a dead-simple interface that could run anywhere (homes, schools, libraries, government offices), allowing anyone to submit an issue, without the need for any technology or profiles. We also added in some useful features, such as the ability to get a phone call when the work is complete.
We still believe very much in the product, and will continue to iterate on it in the future. We hope that within the next six months, our trio of service offerings (iPhone, Facebook, Web) will unite and show what citizen-driven innovation can do for America.
If you’re looking to implement this in your municipality, send us an email.
One of the pains of developing in Wordpress, our Content Management System of choice, is setting up all the blank pages and sample content just so you can see how the site will look once the copy is ready. We made it a whole lot easier!
WP-Dummy-Content is a free Wordpress plugin that will generate and populate a full site structure. This is to make it much easier for developers like ourselves to see how their sites handles under differing amounts of content.
Visit our page for it or download directly off of Wordpress.org
Please be sure to send along any bugs or suggestions!
For the past two months, I participated in Apps for Democracy, a development competition for the Washington, DC government. I watched from the sidelines last year as developers built out amazing applications utilizing DCs data catalog, presenting boring data in useful ways. I was even more excited to learn that this years competition was to build an application with a purpose that could be used by residents.
Ruby on Rails was the language of choice.
So first, I released a library to make it easy for other developers to build their own applications.
Then, I worked with Zach Goodwin, a talented designer (we have a number of projects coming up together), on creating an attractive skin for the application.
Then of course, I built it! Utilizing the latest tools, including the Twilio Phone API, I released an easy to use application to the public. The application was designed and developed to be ridiculously easy to use, to run in kiosks or libraries, and to follow up with you after the work is done, which no other application offers.
And to make it easy for other developers and municipalities, the application is now open source. Two open source projects in one! Of course, if you’re looking for assistance or a developer to adapt this to your needs, I’m available.