Learning the World

One of the big concerns I have going into this spring’s Wordpress Mu pilot is data portability. If we decide not to go ahead with Wordpress, what will happen to the piloter’s blogs? That led me to experiment with WordPress’ import/export options. I knew that you could pull in data from a variety of sources (RSS, Blogger, other Wordpress installs) but I wasn’t sure how well it would deal with exporting.

Last week I decided to put that option to the test, dumping this “Learning the World” blog as a WordPress XML archive and then importing it into a WordPress Mu test install. It came over perfectly, with only two possible hiccups: matching user accounts (e.g. author accounts, commenter accounts, etc.) and files.

With accounts, WordPress wants to map existing accounts in the archive to accounts on the new blog; if you don’t have matching accounts on the new blog, you’re going to either need to map them to one of the accounts you do have, or you are going to have to stop the import, create the necessary accounts, and then do the import.

With files, WordPress gives you the option to suck down files from the original blog, but only as part of the import process. It doesn’t include that data in its initial export, which means if your original blog goes away (and takes the files with it) then you are out of luck. I’d love to see an inclusive export option that grabs everything. 

That said, the export does work pretty well as is; it was fantastic to see Learning the World instantly resurrected in a new install (Cylons anyone?), and it bodes well for moving the trial-run blogs into production at the end of the pilot.

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