Convert Wordpress.com embed links to normal embeds

Question

I've given the task of moving several well established blogs from wordpress.com into an independent hosting using Wordpress. Wordpress.com uses a special parser for taking stuff like this:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/JN3n34dS]

and converting this to a YouTube embed (for example, this happens with other links too, such as Google Maps, etc).

Is there a systematic way to convert all those links to normal embeds?

Thanks!

Answer 1

you could use phpMyAdmin to do a search&replace on the wordpress database for the old youtube embed string and then replace with the new one. Should be possible since the syntax is similar enough.

edit: to add from this other stackexchange question:

Search RegEx is a good plugin to be able to search and replace with Grep through all posts and pages. With that, you can change your shortcodes to the default Embeds « WordPress Codex that self-hosted Wordpress uses, which in its simplest form is just the URL.

Or use WordPress › Viper's Video Quicktags « WordPress Plugins and search/replace to convert to that form of shortcode.

Answer 2

There's a few ways that I can think of

1. Find a plugin that is compatible with that shortcode format
2. Write your own plugin that uses the existing shortcode format from WordPress.com (which I don't think the Shortcode API even allows)
3. Strip out the short code and leave the URL. WordPress will handle the embedding automatically: http://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds