How to Import Your Blog
Things to Consider

How to Import Your Blog

WordPress MU allows you to import your existing blogsite into the blogs.oregonstate.edu environment.

To do this, you will need to perform a little bit of preparation work, though.

The first thing to do is to Export your current blogsite into a file that WordPress can upload. We’ll use WordPress 2.6 as a demonstration, but most blog software has similar features.

To Export a Blog from WordPress 2.6

1. Log into your existing WordPress blog as an Administrator.
2. Click on the Site Admin link.
3. Click on the Manage menu item.
4. Click on the Export menu item.
5. Choose either All Authors, or restrict an Author from being exported, if you wish.
6. Click the Download Export File button.
7. A dialog box will appear.
8. Click the Save File option.
9. Click the OK button.
10. Your WordPress blog will save itself as an xml file.

Import Your File into blogs.oregonstate.edu

1. Log into blogs.oregonstate.edu.
2. Click on the Site Admin link in the Meta menu group (lower right corner).
3. Click on the Manage menu item.
4. Click on the Import menu item.
5. Choose the blog system to import from – there are several, we will use WordPress 2.6 for our example.
6. The Import WordPress screen appears.
7. Click the Browse button.
8. The File Upload dialog box appears.
   1. Locate your WordPress file from your computer and select it.
   2. Click the Open button – your file name will autofill in the necessary field.
   3. Click the Upload File and Import button.
9. The Import WordPress screen opens.
   1. If you have material on your new site already, you can map authors from your old site to your new one with the Map Authors tool. Otherwise, leave it blank.
   2. If your old site contains any file attachments that you would like to include, click the Download and Import File Attachments option.
10. Click the Submit button
11. A page of execution steps will appear. If there are no errors in the upload, the words “All Done. Have Fun” will appear at the bottom of the screen.

That’s all there is to it! For troubleshooting tips, check out our next section, Things to Consider.

Things to Consider

When importing an old blogsite to blogs.oregonstate.edu, there are a few things to consider:

Embedded Media

Embedded media can be anything from a picture, to an audio file, or a video file. There are two different ways to embed media. You can either upload a file, such as a picture, up into the WordPress file manager, or you can embed a third party item, such as a YouTube video.

There aren’t any concerns with embedded third-party media from sites such as Flickr or YouTube. There may be issues, though, with embedded media that is linked to a directory in your old site.

After the import, your links should still work, but they will be pointing to a file that is located on your old site’s server. This may not pose an issue, but if (for some reason) the files were removed, the links to your media would break.

There are a few courses of action you could take:

1. If your media is located at a trusted, reliable source that won’t remove your files you might be all right with leaving your embeds just the way they are.
2. You can re-upload all of your media to your new blogsite and re-set all of the links. For small blogsites, this might not be a problem. For bigger sites with a large quantity of embeds, this might not be a practical solution.