I ought to document all the little steps required to make this migration, in case I need them in future to save me some trouble. Little tiny things have caused me such trouble. Things that are supposed to be intuitively obvious, I guess.
Basically, I followed the instructions on the support site, posted by Poco.
Starting with this thread, I installed EasyPHP.
- First I had to find EasyPHP. It’s French, but the latest version comes with the English language choice.
- Installation was easy enough. Getting it working took a bit more effort. I have XPpro, and I needed to stop IIS in order to get the Apache server to run. Once I got the green light on Apache and MySQL, I was stuck.
- Sometimes it helps to read the installation instructions. I swear they were in French when I was trying this, but now that I go to document it, from their site, there it is in plain English. Anyway. I was tripped up because I didn’t know that all I needed to do was right click on the little e-icon in the System Tray to get the menu of things that could be done with EasyPHP.
- I copied wordpress to a folder under the www directory in the EasyPHP folder on my hard drive.
- I followed the WP installation instructions to define a new local database, etc… (using the phpMyAdmin steps).
- I tried the Import Blogger option in my local WP and got the same CURL extension error, so I enabled the CURL extension (right click EasyPHP –> Configuration –> PHP Extension), tried again and voila! It worked.
- Then I imported my blogger images (to my local WP) using the blogger image import plugin. I had to run it over and over because it times out after 30 seconds. (Lord help you if you try this over dial up!) It eventually retrieved my images (at least most of them) and didn’t appear to hose my database.
- Next I followed the instructions for moving WP to a new server. I used the existing Backup plugin and saved the on-line database to my hard drive, and did the same to my local WP database. Then I compared the two and merged them. This part was no fun. I recommend not doing it. If you migrate from blogger to WP using the long and drawn out method here, get the WP running, but don’t start posting anything that you want to keep until after the migration process is finished. Just get the structure and options and all that set up the way you want, mimic them on your local machine, and when you go to update your online database, upload the local one. I ran into an error when uploading the new database, but found the solution in the support site. The error and what worked for me are documented here (support site).
- Finally, I copied my imported blogger images to my web server.
I had some odds and ends things to clean up, but essentially, the big task is done. Now I will go back and cleanup the loose ends as I have time and ambition. (It may never get done!)
