FAQ

Installation Instructions

1. Upload the blogger-importer folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

Prerequisites

The importer connects your server to the blogger server to copy across the posts. For this to work you need to have connectivity from the server to the internet and also have at least one of the remote access protocols enabled, e.g. curl, streams or fsockopen. You can use the Core Control plugin to test if these are working correctly. The importer connects to Google over a secure connection so OpenSSL needs to be enabled on your server.
The importer uses the SimplePie classes to read and process the data from blogger so you will need the php-xml module installed on your webserver.

Preparation

It is strongly recommended that you disable all other plugins and caching during the import.

This will ensure that the information transfers across as smoothly as possible and that posts and comments are correctly transferrred.

How to use

1. On your Blogger account, visit the Settings->Other page, and locate the “Export Blog” option. This will download an XML file containing your posts and comments.
2. In WordPress, the Blogger Importer is available from the Tools->Import menu.
3. Upload the XML file to WordPress.
4. The posts will be read and you will be given the option to map the authors of the posts appropriately.
5. Allow the import to finish.
6. If the import fails halfway, you can simply retry. Already imported posts will be skipped and not duplicated.

How do I re-import?

Simply upload the XML file again. Already imported posts will be skipped and not duplicated.

Once I’ve imported the posts do I need to keep the plugin?

No, you can remove the plugin once you’ve completed your migration.

How do I know which posts were imported?

Each of the posts loaded is tagged with a meta tags indicating where the posts were loaded from. The permalink will be set to the visible URL if the post was published or the internal ID if it was still a draft or scheduled post

• blogger_author
• blogger_blog
• blogger_permalink

After importing there are a lot of categories

Blogger does not distinguish between tags and categories so you will likely want to review what was imported and then use the categories to tags converter

What about pages?

This importer does not handle blogger pages, you will need to manually transfer them.

What about images?

This version of the importer imports these too, but you can disable this via a setting in the blogger-importer.php file. Tracking images of size 1×1 are not processed. If you with to specifically exclude other images you could code something for the image_filter function.

What size are the images?

The importer will attempt to download the a large version of the file if one is available. This is controlled by the setting “LARGE_IMAGE_SIZE” and defaults to a width of 1024. The display size of the images is the “medium” size of images as defined on WordPress. You can change this in advance if you want to show a different size.

How do I know what images are skipped?

If you hover over the progress bar for images it will tell you how many images are skipped. To see the filenames of these images you will need to enable WordPress debugging to log to file. See https://codex.wordpress.org/Debugging_in_WordPress

What about future posts?

The scheduled posts will be transferred and will be published as specified. However, Blogger and WordPress handle drafts differently, WordPress does not support dates on draft posts so you will need to use a plugin if you wish to plan your writing schedule.

Are the permalinks the same?

No, WordPress and Blogger handle the permalinks differently. However, it is possible to use the redirection plugin or your .htaccess file to map the old URLs across to the new URLs.

My posts and comments moved across but some things are stripped out

The importer uses the SimplePie classes to process the data, these in turn use a Simplepie_Sanitize class to remove potentially malicious code from the source data. If the php-xml module is not installed then this may result in your entire comment text being stripped out and the error “PHP Warning: DOMDocument not found, unable to use sanitizer” to appear in your logs.

The comments don’t have avatars

This is a known limitation of the data that is provided from Blogger. The WordPress system uses Gravatar to provide the images for the comment avatars. This relies the email of the person making the comment. Blogger does not provide the email address in the data feed so WordPress does not display the correct images. You can manually update or script change to the comment email addresses to work around this issue.

It does not seem to be processing the images

The most common reasons for this are lack of memory and timeouts, these should appear in your error log. Also check you’ve not run out of disk space on your server. Because WordPress stores the files in multiple resolutions one image might take up as much as 250kb spread across 5 files of different sizes.

How do I make the images bigger or smaller? / My images are fuzzy

The importer will attempt to download a large version of images but it displays them on the blog at the medium size. If you go into your settings->media options then you can display a different size “medium” image by default. You can’t make this bigger than the file that has been downloaded which is where the next setting comes in.

The default size for the large images is 1024, you can change this to an even larger size by changing the following line in the blogger-import.php file.

const LARGE_IMAGE_SIZE = ‘1024’;

The file downloaded won’t be bigger than the origional file so if it was only 800×600 to start with then it won’t be any bigger than that.

If your origional blog has hardcoded width and height values that are larger than the medium size settings then that might result in your images becoming fuzzy.

I’ve run out of disk space processing the images

The importer is designed to download the high resolution images where they are available. You can either disable the downloading of images or you can change the constant LARGE_IMAGE_SIZE string in the blogger-importer.php file to swap the links with a smaller image.