Derek Hildreth’s Blog

Tutorial: The Full Move From Wordpress.com to Wordpress.org

These are the steps I took to move from a Wordpress.com to a Wordpress.org blog. Some of the steps I outline are the steps that most tutorials leave out (or so personal experience has it). This tutorial is written for the general audience and is OS (Operating System) independent which means it doesn’t matter if you’re running Linux, Mac, or Windows. It will just work.

1.) Find a Shiny New Webhost:

• Shop and decide.

There are a few options for you here; free, self-hosted, or paid webhosting. If you’re interested in a free webhost, I recommend justfree.com. In my opinion, they are the hidden jewel of free webhosting that is just waiting to be discovered. They provide 80GB worth of storage, 80GB+ worth of bandwidth per month, and 3 mySQL databases. There is only one flaw about them in my opinion: they have their PHP server in safe mode which means it’s impossible to use an API key that Wordpress uses for some popular plugins such as Akismet and Blog Stats. Also, they whitelist all of the allowable files you can upload. So far, it hasn’t been much of a problem. Most importantly, if you have an extension you need allowed, you can email them (support[at]justfree[dot]com) and request it to be whitelisted. They have already whitelisted two of my requests.

If you’re a do-it-yourself sort of person, you could always setup your computer to be your web host and then you’ll set your own boundaries. I’ve written a tutorial specifically for Wordpress here: Tutorial: Setup a Totaly Free, Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog. Keep in mind that you’ll also be responsible for keeping uptime and backups which means that you’ll be spending more money on your electric bill. Also, you’ll probably need to spend some time learning Linux and mySQL. No worries though because my tutorial walks you through all of that.

However, if you’re interested in paid hosting, there are thousands of them and it’s impossible for me to suggest the best one for you, but I would suggest checking out the companies that Wordpress recommends.

2.) Setup Wordpress.org:

• Download.
• Upload.
• Install.

Now that you’ve gotten your webhosting figured out, you’ll actually be setting up your Wordpress.org blog. This part is pretty easy, so don’t worry too much. Basically, you download the package, upload the package, and install the package. So, start downloading the latest Wordpress.org package here: http://wordpress.org/download/. Then follow the installation instructions that are located here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress. The way I see it is that Wordpress.org already has excellent documentation so why reinvent the wheel?

3.) Configure Wordpress.org:

• Setup a user.
• Setup permalinks.
• Setup plugins.
• Fix Tag Import Error (Bug #5330).
• Fix Google Video, YouTube Embedded Videos

So, now that you’ve gotten through the first two steps, you’ll want to start configuring Wordpress. First, setup a new user name that’s a little more personable and memorable than “admin”. Do this by logging into wordpress administration. For example, point your browser to “http://mydomain.com/wordpress/wp-admin” and sign in. Then, you’ll see a “Users” category. Click in there and follow the instructions inside to create a new username. Later, you’ll be mapping all of your old posts from Wordpress.com to this username.

Next, you’ll want to setup permalinks. The term “permalinks” is just a fancy title for the link to a particular post. Do this by navigating to Options -> Permalinks. I recommend setting this up to use a “Date and Name Based” permalink rather than the defalt. The difference between the two looks like this:

http://derekhildreth.com/blog/?p=123
http://derekhildreth.com/blog/2008/03/13/sample-post/

You can notice right away that the date and name based permalink is a lot more friendly for you, your visitors, and search engines such as google or yahoo. So, in order to accomplish this look, you’ll need to use the “Custom” field in the permalinks options and type this in the field:
/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%.html
You must add “/index.php” to the beginning of the line in order to maintain the links when importing from a Wordpress.com blog. This is something that I overlooked and had a very hard time finding the answer to, so this step alone will save you hours of frustration. You can customize it to your own looks if you wish.

The next step is to setup any plugins that you want. I suggest you take a look around at the most popular plugins on the wordpress.org website as well as the plugins recommended by lifehack.org.

The last step is only if you’re running Wordpress.org version 2.3 and below. This problem has been fixed in version 2.4, but as of this writing, 2.4 hasn’t been released. This bug really frustrated me, so I’m going to share it with you right away so that you can fix it to avoid the same headaches that I had. There’s a problem with importing tags. When you export from an existing wordpress.com account to this new wordpress.org account, the tags will be imported as numbers instead of words. For example, tags originally called “life” or “technology” will show up as “23″ or “6″. Very annoying. You must apply this fix before importing. Here is the original patch: Bug #5330 Patch.

Download the file from your server at wordpress/wp-admin/import/wordpress.php and open it in your favorite text editor (such as notepad, emacs, vi, etc…). Goto line 399 and change the line that looks like this:
$post_tags[] = $tag_id;

To this:
$post_tags[] = intval($tag_id);

Save the file and upload it back to your webserver at wordpress/wp-admin/import/wordpress.php. Again, apply this fix only if you’re running version 2.3 or below. This has been fixed in version 2.4 which is rumored to be released sometime in March of 2008.

The final thing to accomplish is in preparation for the import stage. If you’ve embedded any videos including Google Video or YouTube in your old Wordpress.com blog, you will only see them as “http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=.=xxx” or “” (I had to add the period in order to keep the text from being converted to embedded video). This is because the plugins that were included for you in Wordpress.com are different than any of the plugins available for Wordpress.org. But there is one particular plugin called EasyTube that is very, very similar and all it needs is one simple change to the code of the plug-in to make it work on your new blog. Use the link above to download and install this plugin. Then, navigate in your Wordpress.com administration panel to “Plugins->Plugin Editor” and click on the “EasyTube” plugin file. Find this line:
$regex = ‘/\/i’;

and change the colon “:” to an equals sign “=”:
$regex = ‘/\/i’;

Similarly, find this line:
$regex = ‘/\http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=/i’;

and change it to this:
$regex = ‘/\http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=/i’;

Commit the changes by saving the file. When finished with this step, all of your previous embedded videos will now be visible.

I know that it seems like we just went through a lot of work, but it’s far less than what you would have spent trying to resolve this issues that inevitably would have shown up. Let’s get to the fun parts.

4.) Move Your Posts.

• Export from Wordpress.com
• Import to Wordpress.org

This is where you move all of your posts from Wordpress.com to Wordpress.org. In your administration panel in Wordpress.com, navigate to “Manage->Export” and download the export file. In the administration panel in Wodpress.org, navigate to “Manage->Import” and upload the file you just exported. Wordpress will then ask you to map the authors names to the names within your new blog. This is the reason we made a new username other than “admin” in the last step. After this, Wordpress will take care of everything and in no time at all, you should have all of your posts on your new Wordpress.com blog.

5.) Other Concerns.

I would suggest leaving a message on your now old Wordpress.com blog stating that you’ve moved and provide a link to forward your guests to the now new Wordpress.org blog. Leave your posts there and start making all of your new posts on the new blog. At least, that’s my suggestion. There are other suggestions.

A gentleman by the name of Chris Sandberg, has put together an interesting article on switching from Wordpress.com to Wordpress.org and still keeping all the traffic. It’s located here. Also, it looks like he has updated it with new information and the newer links is located here.

Conclusions.

I hope that this tutorial helped you in moving from Wordpress.com to Wordpress.org. I believe I have included many resources and provided the necessary knowledge to assist you in accomplishing this goal. If you have any questions or run into any problems, please let me know in the comments so others may benefit as well.

Tags: export, free webhost, googlevideo, guide, how to, import, permalinks, tags, tips, transfer, tutorial, webhost, wordpress.com, wordpress.org, youtube