Betalogue

I am afraid my plans to move this blog to www.betalogue.com and start using a new blogging system have hit a snag.

The basic problem is that there is no easy way to migrate all my existing data (blog entries, membership information, user comments) from pMachine to WordPress. Based on what I am reading on the WordPress forums, there is no “official” importer script in WordPress itself. Somebody has come up with some kind of converter, but it “needs testing” and only supports a conversion from pMachine 2.3 to WordPress 1.2, while I want to use WordPress 1.5.

The guide that I referred to the other day is not a realistic option. It’s far from complete and, as far as I can tell, causes all kinds of information to be lost in the process.

One other option would be to upgrade from pMachine to ExpressionEngine, but it would be a significant expense and the more I look at ExpressionEngine, the less I like it. I don’t like its system for URLs for blog entries. It still has too much “cruft” in it. I don’t like the fact that the documentation fails to address some basic issues. It doesn’t say, for example, whether you can have a syndication feed with the full text of your blog entries. (I think you can, but this is not addressed anywhere in the documentation.) I don’t like the fact that RSS feeds for blog entry comments are not included by default. (It looks like you can create them manually yourself — but WordPress includes them automatically by default.)

At some point I thought that I could “cheat” and upgrade my pMachine Pro 2.3 install to the trial version of ExpressionEngine, and then convert from ExpressionEngine to WordPress. But based on my research on the WordPress forums, there is even less support for conversion from ExpressionEngine to WordPress than there is for conversion from pMachine to WordPress…

Another option for me would be to start from scratch… and import my old blog entries manually. I have over 1,500 of them, but I could use BBEdit to automate part of the process. Still, it would be a major undertaking. And it wouldn’t help with the conversion of all the user comments… (Somehow I don’t see myself resubmitting all the user comments manually…)

Basically I am stuck. I might still end up purchasing ExpressionEngine, in spite of the things that I don’t like about the product. It would be a disappointing outcome, but at this point I don’t really see what other choice I have.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, July 14th, 2005 at 12:26 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.