Migrating your WordPress Blog
I needed to migrate a WordPress blog from one webhost to another. After installing WordPress 2.5.3 on the new host, I looked around for some way of getting the content moved over. The recommended method was to import the content from a WXR file (WordPress eXtended RSS). However, the old host was running WordPress 1.5 and it did not have an export function. The closest equivalent was the Backup function which saves the whole database as an SQL file.
Importing the SQL directly into the new site with PhpMyAdmin was one option, but since the database design may have changed between WordPress 1.5 and 2.5, importing the SQL was going to be risky.
The method I chose in the end was to install the WordPress-to-Wordpress Import plugin on the old site.
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Download the ZIP file and extract.
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Upload wp-xmlmigrate.php to wp-content/plugins/. You dont need the wordpress.php unless you are importing to an old version of WordPress.
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Activate the plugin. This adds WP Export under the Manage menu.
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Select the categories you want to export, and click the Download button and save the file.
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On the new site, click Manage > Import.
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Select the WXR file you downloaded and give it some time to import everything.
The import process does a pretty good job of loading the content, and it even uploads images and attachments from the old site to the new one. You will have to clean up a number of links
