26 May, 2011
Moving from Typepad to WordPress
Posted by: Jennifer In: WordPress|WordPress: Lessons Learned
I recently had a client who wanted to move from TypePad to WordPress. An interesting procedure, let me tell you. The most critical help came from this post on foliovision.com. Of particular note, was the way they pulled down all the images from the Typepad site – using HTTrack.
My original plan was to use this plugin: Cache Images – to import the pictures. The reason being that I needed the images attached to their various posts for the template – which is what that plugin does in addition to loading all externally referenced images onto your own server. But the way Typepad is storing the images now, the plugin doesn't really work. The images are referenced without a file extension at the end – which is what that plugin specifically uses to search for images. So that is why I used HTTrack to pull down the images first.
After I had a folder of all the images for the site – I put that up on a DIFFERENT server. (I know, a little confusing but hang in there with me)
I then used the search regex plugin to change references to the images without an extension to the temporary location of those images on my other server – but this time WITH the .jpg extensions:
Search string (regex options turned on)
#src="http://www.MY-CLIENTS-TYPEPAD-DOMAIN.com/\.a/([^\s]+(?=))"#i
and replaced it with:
src="http://MYREMOTESERVER.COM/DIRECTORYNAME/$1.jpg"
Now with all the references using the appropriate .jpg extension and pointing to MY server, I was then able to go back and use the "Cache Images" plugin to pull down the images and attach them to their respective posts.