Still Having Media Import Issues from self-hosted to self-hosted

I should also note that because we are on a multisite setup I can use the export import method with no issues in WP 3.5.2+ if we are staying on the same server. Meaning, Blog A is exported and imported into Blog B on the same multisite setup and all media is imported properly.

This issue only seems to appear when going from 2 separate servers with different IPs and DNS names.

Has anyone else been able to verify that media import works with 3.6 or 3.5.2 going to separate servers and installs?

Confirm that the import/export process in WP 3.5.2 failed to transfer links on my pages. Macintosh computers using MAMP/localhost.
Struggling to transfer work from home to school and back. Nothing works.

I may have a fix for this. From what I can see, there is a new piece of base site url information that the importer doesn’t know about; or, perhaps, not being a multi-site expert, it may have something to do with how you configure your media storage. In any case, here are the mods that worked for me.

In the “wordpress importer 0.6.1” plugin, I had to modify two files in the importer plugin:

In parsers.php:

After line 92 (look for ‘$base_url’ in line 92), add these two lines:

$base_blog_url = $xml->xpath('/rss/channel/wp:base_blog_url');
$base_blog_url = (string) trim( $base_blog_url[0] );

In wordpress-importer.php:

After line 50 (“$base_url…”) add a new line:

var $base_blog_url = '';

Now, change line 156 (“$this->base_url = esc_url( $import_data[‘base_url’] );”) to:

$this->base_url = ! empty($import_data['base_blog_url']) ? esc_url( $import_data['base_blog_url'] ) : esc_url( $import_data['base_url'] );

That allowed me to import my content. Hope this works for you.

Thanks Maxwelton.
I will look into this and try out your solution. We are finished though with importing content between the two sites but this may still be useful in the future.

Hey guys.
I think I have the solution. For me, it worked, but I have encountered another problem, cause the blog I’m working with has many photos on a single post. This huge mass of Mb drives me crazy and I gave up using this import method, creating one on my own.

Here what I found after a little research on the code:
In version 3.5.2 the function wp_http_validate_url was introduced (file: /wp-includes/http.php). For some reason that I don’t care, this function validates URLs that wordpress try to reach and I don’t know if it is really important for other validations.

The function that import media files (function request() at line 81 of /wp-includes/class-http.php file) calls this URL validation function on line 124 and, I don’t know why, the returned value is always blank (empty string) even with a valid url, causing error on the line 131 of class-http.php (‘A valid URL was not provided.’).

To solve this problem you need to comment this piece of code (starting at line 122 until line 126):

/*
if ( function_exists( 'wp_kses_bad_protocol' ) ) {
	if ( $r['reject_unsafe_urls'] )
		$url = wp_http_validate_url( $url );
	$url = wp_kses_bad_protocol( $url, array( 'http', 'https', 'ssl' ) );
}
*/

I strongly recommend to uncomment this after importing your media files. This validation function is there for some reason and leaving this commented won’t be a good idea.

Hope I helped!
best regards

Thank You!!!

I had trouble importing media from a (publicly accessible) dev server to live (3.8.3 multisite). After enabling debug mode in the importer it was throwing the “Failed to connect to server” message. Temporarily commenting out lines 109-113 in /wp-includes/class-http.php (the wp_kses_bad_protocol validation noted by leomuniz above fixed the problem. Thanks!