Not terribly riveting reading but this is the story of my migration from textpattern (version 4.0.4) to serendipity (version 1.1.3). This includes some PHP scripts I used to fix some problems on import - they're not the best or the most robust in the world but they worked for me and I wanted to pop them here in case they work for someone else. Feedback on the code isn't necessary because I won't be using it again ;)

A running start

Firstly let me say that serendipity has a fabulous import feature which brought in 90% of my content about 30 seconds after I saw the button labelled "Import Data". This is a real hurdle-remover for new users and definitely clinched the deal for me. Having done this I found that:

• I had weird entity encodings everywhere
• my images hadn't arrived
• everything seemed much more spaced out than it had been on the old blog

Images

The images hadn't been transferred and I also realised that the custom tags that textpattern uses, such as:

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hadn't been handled by the import script, so I kind of had two problems to solve. I started by transferring all the images across and renaming them to something more helpful.

This is going to be a really long article, but do read on if its helpful - I'm posting the rest as extended content so the disinterested need not scroll past it!Here's the code I used to move my images (both databases were on the same server as were both installations - this helped to simplify matters quite a bit. Also I have used an exec() call in this script - maybe not the most secure thing in the world but perfect for this fast-and-dirty one-off import script.

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This placed all my images in the relavant folder in the serendipity upload folder, which was great. But I still had those mangled image tags to deal with. I wrote a script which edited each entry (its not pretty but it really did work) and fixed this - here it is:

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It took a few attempts (mostly involving getting the same image multiple times on posts where there was more than one image.

Entities

The way that textpattern stores character entities gave me a problem when they were then imported into textpattern, and I had ’ and other such "features" all over the place. With a lot of swearing and some help from my friend (thanks Sara!) I eventually got it untangled using this:

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There might be a few others that got through but putting these in certainly sorted out the majority of the problems with the encoding. I'm a little unclear why textpattern and serendipity couldn't communicate on this front but the main thing is that I did get most of my content through.

Vertical Space

The spacing problems that I had early on I "fixed" by running my code through a script to remove a load of whitespace - actually I was seeing this output because I had the nl2br plugin turned on. Sadly now I've formatted all my existing posts I can't turn it off without re-reformatting them so I'm just living I with what I have for the time being!

Import Scripts and One-Shots

I've had quite a bit of experience doing data import routines and I applied some of the same principles to solving the problems I experiences with this migration from textpattern to serendipity. I'm really happy with the new platform, I'd like to hang on to some of the stuff that I used for this, and so I've stored it here. If it helps you too, then great :)