Migrating a blog and podcast from WordPress?

[NoRightsPro]

Hello, everybody :) Before asking questions I wanted to congratulate @marcantondahmen, not just for the progress with V2 but for all the work they've put in on Automad in general. I first became aware of the project looking into flat-file CMSs around 2017 and it's evolved into something so unique.

I've got a fairly sizable blog and podcast archive on WordPress. Originally I was going to use Automad for another site with HTML5 canvas animation to recreate the fun, experimental days of Flash interactivity. Then decided it'd be easier to combine the two. What's the best way to import archives? I know 11ty has a WP import tool that seems to do a decent job. Wondering if I should try that, customize the Base Blog Theme, then port that to Automad. They also suggest other resources for converting WP Export to Markdown.

The podcast is another thing I'm not sure how to tackle. Looking at Automad's RSS Feed documentation it seems I would just need to make a Podcast page and add the templates to the feed content? Then add a player in an HTML block and link the file for downloads? I'd want to make sure I'm adding all the requirements for Apple Podcasts or the Podcast Feed Standard and verifying the feed, of course.

If anybody has advice or suggestions, I'd appreciate sharing :D

[marcantondahmen]

Hi and thank you. If I understand you correctly, you anyway plan to build or port over your own theme. In that case you can replace the main part with the content in templates with a text field that renders Markdown:

@{ textMain | markdown }

The text prefix tells the dashboard that you want to use a basic Markdown text editor.

Then you can just copy paste the exported Markdown over.

However, in case you want to try a block editor workflow instead, basic HTML can just be pasted into a block editor and it will be converted. At least for text based elements.

In that case use a block editor field:

@{ +main }

Regarding the podcast feed. I recommend creating a page for each podcast and render a pagelist on a podcast overview page. The feed can handle then each episode as a separate entity with it's own date etc.

[NoRightsPro]

Thank you so much for your response 😃 Basically my first question was how should I go about importing the posts from the XML file the WordPress exporter spits out to individual files in the proper format? 363 blogs and 184 podcast episodes is a bit much to edit manually. 😰 (I confess I tried ChatGPT to walk me through some of my earlier attempts 🫣 It kept trying to run a CLI to get Automad to convert them and got hung up on location paths in Docker. Then it tried a PHP script and, while I got exported files to show in the dashboard eventually, none of them appeared published or complete) I've been working on a child theme of Standard v1 and intend to use blocks for future content. It's just bringing over the archives that's proving a hassle and I only considered Markdown because that's what so many CMSs seem to run on/convert to. If you can recommend how you'd move over something like my mess of a site, I'd be eternally grateful 😅

I love the elegance of the template engine. So many solutions come out in a form like @{ answer | easy }

Honestly I only looked over the feed documentation as I was writing this topic and didn't think it would be so simple. Was fully expecting to have to do some patchwork hacking like I've seen for Static Site Generators which is why I mentioned 11ty as an example. (I've been on WordPress too long and keep assuming I'll have to build everything on a new site myself) Thank you so much for your help.

[marcantondahmen]

I guess you approach is already pretty good. You can create one example page manually, take a look at the JSON and then convert the xml file into such a JSON file. In order to publish, just directly push the content into the published field instead of draft.