Importing blogger comments

Ah, no responses. Well…. for the benefit of everyone else traveling this route, here’s some hints.
I found out that the Movable Type import handles comments but the blogger one doesn’t. So I scoured the net for a blogger to mt template. Most didn’t support comments. The one below, does (sort of).
I found it on hitormiss.org. Except I added the “STATUS: Publish” line (important).

<Blogger>
TITLE: <BlogItemTitle><BlogItemURL>\"></BlogItemURL><$BlogItemTitle$></BlogItemTitle>
AUTHOR: <$BlogItemAuthor$>
DATE: <$BlogItemDateTime$>
STATUS: Publish
-----
BODY:
<$BlogItemBody$>
-----
<BlogItemCommentsEnabled><BlogItemComments>COMMENT:
AUTHOR: <$BlogCommentAuthor$>
DATE: <$BlogCommentDateTime$>
<$BlogCommentBody$>
-----</BlogItemComments></BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
--------</Blogger>

Follow the blogger export instructions at Movable Type, but use the above template instead.
Once you have your export file. You’ll need to do some manual cleanup. You have to remove all the email addresses from around your comment names. I did that using a regular expression in dreamweaver. If you want to keep those email addresses, then you’re on your own to figure that one out. I decided to ditch mine but I may try to add them in later somehow.
You’ll also need to make sure there’s a linefeed after any of the dashed lines. Somehow on my export, many of the comments were missing a linefeed after the dashes. (important note: don’t change the number of dashes).
I also had some stray closing ‘a’ tags that I needed to delete.
After that I followed the instructions for importing MoveableType comments into WP, and I was all set, comments and all.
Only thing I didn’t clean up was that, for some reason on posts without comments, there were some spare dashes floating around at the bottom of the post. Oh well.
It took me a few tries to get all of this right. I messed up a few times and had to empty my post, post2cat, and comments tables a few times. If you do that, take the proper precautions and backup your data.
I hope that helps.
-Matt

Hi

I didn;t see this before I imported, but if I had, it still seems alittle complicated for me.

I added to the wordpress import template, so that in the post-body section, I also included the comments. By adding a COMMENTS: break in bold they are clearly defined. In retrospect I would also add a <—more—> tag before the comments so that I don’t have to do it manually.

It worked well to preserve the comments, even if they didn’t count as comments in WP. Second best, but for me, less complicated.

Steve ??

Is there an import feature with WP? The MT instructions say to click import entries…. and that just doesn’t seem possible for WP – I did the export stuff, but what about the import!!

Hey, everyone! I just finished testing my hacked import-blogger.php and it worked like a charm for my blog. What it does is basically the same as the original, with these modifications:
It imports all Blogger comments.
It skips duplicate posts but imports all comments for all duplicate posts. This is for those of us who have already used the non-comment importer. Be sure not to run this new importer twice because it WILL result in duplicate comments!
Let me just reiterate one thing here: if you run this twice on the same blog, you will wind up with twice the comments. I couldn’t get the dupcheck to work for comments. Sorry!

Here is the code.

Any bug reports are welcome. This was my first PHP project!

Andy Skelton
https://www.skeltoac.com

I’ve had problems with the above template so I have provided a modifed version of this Blogger template so that it will work with Comments and also outline a few further steps to take to configure Blogger before exporting entries.

I hope it proves useful. The page can be found here on my web site; Prete.ntio.us.