WP Gatsby Markdown Exporter

Description

The plugin creates zip files containing posts converted to Markdown. A WP-CLI command exists to handle exporting sites with a large amount of content.

• Move WordPress content to Gatsby-friendly Markdown.
• Customize the export! Remap and restructure exported fields.
• CLI: Avoid PHP timeouts by using the command line with WP-CLI.
• CLI: Export progress bar (great for large sites)!

Reminder: always keep a backup of the WordPress database and files in case your export doesn’t work as expected!

Working with Gatsby

If you’re just getting started with Gatsby, we recommend experimenting with a Markdown based Gatsby starter like Tina Grande. Installation is as easy as:

git clone https://github.com/tinacms/tina-starter-grande.git

cd tina-starter-grande

yarn install && gatsby develop

Then copy your exported WordPress Markdown into the content directory or point the wp gatsby-markdown-export command at the content directory.

Want to port your WordPress or HTML theme to Gatsby? Checkout Porting an HTML Site to Gatsby for tips.

Command Line Usage

The command line functionality uses WP-CLI to interact with WordPress. WP-CLI is easy to install if you haven’t already.

Once it’s installed, you can export content to a directory like this:

wp gatsby-markdown-export --directory=/example/gatsby-starter/src/content

All CLI arguments are optional.

Option
Description
Default value

--help
get help

--directory=
export output directory
random temp directory

--post_types=
post types to export, see: https://developer.www.ads-software.com/reference/classes/wp_query/#post-type-parameters
page,post

--post_status=
post status to export, see: https://developer.www.ads-software.com/reference/classes/wp_query/#status-parameters
any

--fields_to_markdown=
fields to convert to Markdown
excerpt

--excluded_front_matter=
fields to exclude from front matter

--post_date_format=
format for post publish date, see: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
c

--upload_dir=
directory in the export to copy WordPress uploads
uploads

--remap_fields=
remap front matter field names, example: find1,replace1;find2,replace2

--fields_to_array=
convert single value front matter fields to arrays

--include_private_fields=
private post meta fields to include (they start with _)

--skip_copy_uploads
flag, skips copying WordPress uploads to the export

--skip_original_images
flag, skips the use of original dimension images

--skip_enforce_charset
flag, skips use of blog_charset for the XML charset

--create_type_directory
flag, creates directories based on post type

Screenshots

Installation

1. Upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/plugin-name directory, or install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress
3. Use the Settings->Export to Gatsby screen to export content

FAQ

What does `Warning: The markdown converter encountered invalid HTML and could not convert the content at:` mean?

This means that the markdown converter couldn’t convert the referenced post to markdown, so we will just copy the HTML as it is.

Reviews

Did the trick for me in WP 6.0.2

kalico September 9, 2022

I decided to take a chance on this plugin because I desperately needed to convert some files to Markdown so I could bring them into in my Obsidian vault. I backed myself into this nasty little corner by experimenting with Journey.cloud for a few months. I misread their documentation to indicate that it would be simple to export my content, but IT WAS NOT. I did not want to use any of the half-baked command line scripts floating around on GitHub for Journey to .md because I read comments and issue reports and I simply did not have time to deal with all the layers of stuff that I invariably run into. I finally decided to publish each of my notes as a draft to my own WordPress site manually. (I did this one at a time…there were only 60 of them or I might have chosen the command line option instead.) Then I used this plugin to export them in Markdown format, so I could add them to my Obsidian vault. This is not a fancy plugin and I had some manual cleanup to do, but that was a small price to pay. This won’t continue working forever if no one is maintaining it, but it did what I needed it to do in WP 6.0.2.

Works great!

April 30, 2020

Just what I needed — to export all my posts and pages in a readable format! The formatting conversion is beautiful — straight to markdown! Each page and post is its own file. Just great!

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

0.3.3

• Support including private post meta fields (like Yoast)