Migrating from b2evolution to WordPress

Once you are stuck on b2evolution, it becomes a daunting task to move your content to another blogging engine. I have always envied the WordPress bloggers and the WordPress eco-system of plugins, but never made the transition due to the painstaking task of moving content.

WordPress does not provide a proper importer, but there are a few options mentioned on the WordPress Wiki. After my basic installation of WordPress, I copied the legacy PHP importer into the admin folder and ran the PHP script which then proceeded to import content into the WordPress DB.

The import works taking the content along, but fails to accurately import the correct Permalinks – in my case the published date was wrong in about 80% of cases, which results in many 404’s. Instead of manually changing the publish date, get the 404 Redirected plugin which will solve all your issues. Even with the 404 Redirected plugin, you will need to manage the 404’s by reassigning tags and categories, but this is substantially easier with the plugin then having to edit your .htaccess-file.

Another big issue is that the existing importers do not import your media into the WordPress gallery and adjust the URLs in the posts. Since most of my images had been crawled and manually updating posts would have been too cumbersome, I decided to just copy the “media”-folder from b2evolution into my WordPress directory.

Once you copied the media-folder, use the standalone smush.it Java application (you need a version of Java installed on your hosting account) to re-optimize images in the media-folder and then also install the smush.it plugin which will optimize future image uploads.

Over the next few days I will post additional information about the WordPress plugins I installed which will make your blog rock!