I recently finished a new project with my buddy Cord Blomquist. The site is called TypePad2Wordpress, and just as you’d expect, its a service site that allows for easy migration of TypePad data into a Wordpress blog. It does a lot of work to bring over your images, rewrite links and references to match your new Wordpress equivalent, and generally works very hard to make sure as many of your assets and files are automatically brought over into your new, modern system.
I’ve worked with Cord on a couple of side projects moving people from TypePad/MoveableType blogs over to Wordpress, and while there are many tutorials and tools that exist to help a bit with this process, none of them work very well. A substantial amount of polish was needed, and it seemed like there should be a simpler, turn key solution.
So, TP2WP is that solution. You give it your exported MoveableType/TypePad data, and it gives you an XML file you can feed into your Wordpress blog. Our custom version of the Wordpress importer helps with further migration issues (routing issues with staging sites, missing files on the original server, importing extension-less image references that TypePad creates, etc.) to again make the whole process a 20 minute affair, instead of a 3-5 day project.
We’ve relied on a lot of open source tools to get this project done quickly, and wanting to be good open source citizens, here is some giving back. Specifically, I’ve released the libraries I wrote for parsing the TypePad exported MTIF data. MTIF files can be huge (they’re your whole blog after all) so the classes do a lot of work to keep memory use low, while also providing a convenient, iterable interface for the document.
The code for the PHP MTIF-Parser classes is all up on GitHub. Pull away!
So, if you know anyone stuck on MoveableType or TypePade, and they’re looking to move to a modern, better supported system, please let them know about tp2wp.com. Its only $99 and it’ll save them hours of days of work.
And if you’re feeling extra tender and kind, give us a vote on Quora and help other people find out about our dope solution!
