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I've become a big fan of Tumblr for a few reasons (the minimalism, ease of making quote/photo/video style posts, and the clients for mobile devices I use), so I've decided that after 7 loyal years of using WordPress, both hosted privately and the wordpress.com hosted solution, it's time to move.

Unfortunately I have no idea how to do this properly. A few posts on the internet suggest importing from an RSS feed, but that won't quite cut it - my requirements are:

  • I keep the same base URL (easy enough by mucking around with DNS records)
  • All existing post URLs work, or at least 301 redirect to the new URL (to minimise loss of PageRank)
  • Media such as embedded photos gets sensibly imported
  • Comments get imported

Any idea how I should go about doing this? Thanks!

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You'll get better results asking in a tumblr forum - this has little to do with WordPress once you've redirected your site away from a WordPress instance (which is the first thing you said you'll do). Perhaps tumblr has an import for a WordPress export file. – anu Jun 9 '11 at 11:24
I thought I'd ask here as there's no Tumblr stackexchange site, and I hoped some people here may have had a similar experience -- but thanks, I'll repost the same question on a Tumblr forum. – David Claridge Jun 9 '11 at 11:27
Your best hope is that tumblr knows how to import a WordPress export file. – anu Jun 9 '11 at 11:28
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any import mechanism on Tumblr at all :( – David Claridge Jun 9 '11 at 11:32
I added a wordpress to tumblr migration tutorial how to do this in a semi-automated manner – Philipp Keller Jan 9 at 8:43

closed as off topic by Rarst♦ Jun 12 '11 at 18:25

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2 Answers

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I'm thinking if there's no easy way, I could process a WordPress export and use the Tumblr API write method to re-create all the posts, including date and slug... the URLs are likely to end up a little different, though, so I might need to use some mod-rewrite magic until Google picks up on the 301s.

Edit: in fact there seem to be two such scripts already, one by Phil Toland and another by Mark Wunsch

I don't much like the idea of losing my comments, though.

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Here's a Python script: https://github.com/jonthornton/wp2tumblr It was released in November 2010 and was reported to work well - with one minor change to the WordPress XML export file. The change is documented in the issues on the project's github page.

The person I pointed to it said all content was imported including comments.

Update On checking, that Python script does not import comments, however I have another suggestion (untested) that may work for you.

There is a WordPress plugin that allows you to send your posts to Tumblr, including old posts: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tumblrize/

To get comments in, you could consider adding Disqus to your WordPress site and exporting comments into Disqus: http://docs.disqus.com/help/24/

Then, add Disqus to Tumblr: http://tumblring.net/how-to-add-disqus-comments-to-tumblr/ There may be a way to import the comments into Tumblr but that is an issue for Tumblr support.

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Hmm, from looking at the code there doesn't seem to be any mention of comments. – David Claridge Jun 9 '11 at 13:07
You are right - that Python code doesn't include comments. I haven't been able to get hold of the code my friend used but I updated my answer with a workaround. – Elpie Jun 10 '11 at 4:15

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