Work continues slowly on the new site. I’ve started writing some of the content for the additional pages i’ll be adding to complement the existing blog and i’m knee deep in the template’s innards at the moment. Nothing to show off yet though.
Annoyingly, i’m still having trouble with the Blogger to WordPress conversion. Remember I said that the importer doesn’t import images? Well I found the Blogger Image Import plugin over at Notions which allows you to get around this. It works well except it only works for jpegs really and it puts the images in a convoluted folder structure in the WordPress uploads folder.
I probably could have soldiered on like that but it bugged me. I’m also not sure that it updated all the links correctly as promised – it’s been a while since i tried it. Anyway, to satisfy myself I manually downloaded all the images from my Blogger blog, placing the images into a folder structure like WordPress uses – uploads/year/month – before copying this over to WordPress. It was a monumental effort – nearly 300 images – but I did it. Now i’ve discovered another problem: despite the files being stored in the WordPress Uploads folder, the Media Library can’t see them!
Apparently, the only way the library can see them is if they are uploaded using the built-in WordPress uploader (ie, at the time of writing a post). Since I don’t fancy having to manually import them one by one (something I may have to do), I had another look round for a solution. I found two plugins by Dion Hulse (DD32). Add From Server and dPost Uploads.
Add From Server allows you to copy images from a server into the WP uploads folder, at the same time telling WP to recognise them and show them in the media library. A downside is that it dates them as today’s date. I haven’t actually tried it yet because it has another feature: When you select to copy files already in the uploads folder, it doesn’t copy them but it still creates the links to show them in the gallery AND it dates them based on the folder they were found in – so 2008/11 would yield November 2008. This would be perfect, except it didn’t work for me=(
It has certainly created the linkage to show the images in the media gallery, but it seems to have assigned their urls as the full directory structure of my website (ie from the root folder on the server right down) and the result is broken links in WP. I’m still waiting for a reply to the Q I posted on Dione’s forum so we’ll see how it goes.
His other plugin, dPost Uploads claims to allow you to change the date an image is posted at based on the existing post’s date, rather than just using today’s date. It’s useful if you’re adding an image to an old post. I’ve yet to try it though.
Anyway, if I come up with a solution, you’ll be the first to hear!
