Export and migrate WordPress to Ghost

A little while ago I installed Ghost on IIS, along with the required Node.js and iisnode module. All in an isolated test environment, in which Ghost runs as a production site only. Now I wanted migrate from WordPress to Ghost, but failed. Here's the write up.

Export WordPress content into a JSON format

Migrate from WordPress to Ghost and import posts from wordPress into Ghost, how to.

There are two ways to export your WordPress blog content into Ghosts JSON format:

1. the Export to Ghost plugin
2. wp2ghost, which will convert WordPress XML exports (WXR) to the Ghost JSON format

I tried both and both produced a JSON file, so that's good.

Protip: format your WordPress JSON export file

The produced JSON export file is one long string, which makes it really difficult to read (and fix errors). I decided to format my JSON file for readability. With python json.tool:

$ cat wp2ghost_export_1402927865.json | python -mjson.tool > wp2ghost.json

Now you can actually read the contents of your JSON file and fix errors later on when they occur (they will...).

JSONLint - The JSON Validator

JSONLint.com is an online tool to validate your JSON file. JSONLint is a validator and reformatter for JSON, a lightweight data-interchange format.

It's a great aid for when you run into error messages such as:

{"error":"Failed to parse the import JSON file"}

Import WordPress content into Ghost

To import your WordPress content into Ghost, you need to visit your the Ghost debug tools page at http://www.example.com/ghost/debug. Select the file and press IMPORT.

If all goes well, your WordPress content is imported into Ghost. It didn't go well on my site... A little pop-up provided only the error message:

A problem was encountered while importing new content to your blog. Error: unknown

and unfortunately iisnode didn't log more information within its log directory. I tried again, and I first enabled my Chrome Developer Tool (function key F12). The Network tab displayed all requests and showed an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error on the import, but nothing more.

Since I host on IIS, I enabled IIS Detailed Errors and tried again. Now the response contained a real error message:

{"error":"Value in [posts.title] exceeds maximum length of 150 characters.<br>Value in [tags.description] exceeds maximum length of 200 characters."}

Praising myself for making my JSON file more readable, I grepped the title: grep \"title\" wp2ghost.json and found one title longer than 150 characters. I couldn't find a long tags description though, so I tried again.

This resulted in an error again:

{"error":"Value in [tags.slug] exceeds maximum length of 150 characters."}

After fixing this error too (e.g, shorten the slug), I could successfully import my WordPress content into Ghost. So I guess there was no problem with the tags.description.

Thank you very much! <3 ❤️