art taylor

I succeeded (more or less) in importing my ancient Blogger posts into Drupal.

I used this guide as a base, but the database format has changed significantly with Drupal version 4.7. node and node_revisions have been broken out into two tables, making the SQL generated by the php template not work. As a result, I had to change it slightly, to the following:

<?php
$nid = 213;
<Blogger>
$iid = '<$BlogItemNumber$>';
$nid++;
$node=array();

$node['title']=<<<ENDOFSTRING
<$BlogItemTitle$>
ENDOFSTRING;

if (trim($node['title']) == "") $node['title'] = "title";

$node['body']=<<<ENDOFSTRING
<$BlogItemBody$>
ENDOFSTRING;
$node['date']=strtotime('<$BlogItemDateTime$>');
$node['number']='<$BlogItemNumber$>';
$node['permalink']='<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>';

echo "INSERT INTO node_revisions (nid, vid, title, uid, timestamp, teaser, body, format)
VALUES(".$nid.", ".$nid.", '".addslashes($node['title'])."', 1, ".$node['date'].", '".addslashes($node['body'])."', '".addslashes($node['body'])."', 3);\
\
";

echo "INSERT INTO node (nid, vid, type, title, uid, created, changed, comment, promote, moderate, sticky)
VALUES(".$nid.", ".$nid.", 'story', '".addslashes($node['title'])."', 1, ".$node['date'].", ".$node['date'].", 2, 1, 0, 0);\
\
";

<BlogItemComments>
$comment=array();
$comment['number']='<$BlogCommentNumber$>';
$comment['body']=<<
<$BlogCommentBody$>
ENDOFSTRING;
$comment['author']=<<<ENDOFSTRING
<$BlogCommentAuthor$>
ENDOFSTRING;
$comment['date']=strtotime('<$BlogCommentDateTime$>');

echo "insert into comments (nid, subject, comment, hostname, timestamp, thread, name) values(".$nid.", 'comment', '".addslashes($comment['body'])."', '127.0.0.1', '".$comment['date']."', '1/', '".addslashes($comment['author'])."');\
\
";

</BlogItemComments>
</Blogger>
?>

The changes should be self-explanatory. I also needed to do some escaping of $-values (whether symbolic dollar amounts, or inline perl/php), and I made a slight mistake on time settings, so I had to do a quick series of update node_revisions set timestamp = timestamp + 39600 where nid > 213; update node set created = created + 39600 where nid > 213; update node set changed = created where nid > 213; (yes, I know the last two could be combined) to account for an 11-hour time difference in posts. This wasn't a big deal, and after two to five years, who'd notice?

Because of the table drift in versions, I didn't mess with any of the php teaser fixes on the page mentioned above. I didn't want to mangle things more than I already had. I also didn't worry much about comments, because I never enabled them on Blogger.

In all, though, it was a pretty simple conversion, other than having > 500 posts titled "title" that I decided to change to "Untitled" for no good reason.