I made this project to read a WordPress export and create the markdown files for Hugo. It'll speed up the process of moving your blog over to Hugo and let you avoid a bunch of manual work.
It came about when I was talking to somebody who was trying to move their site over and didn't want to manually copy and reformat all their posts. They had trouble finding a tool to do it, so I wrote one.
I want to make sure it's useful to people before charging them, so it'll give you a download with 3 pages and 5 blog posts converted for free and without asking for any information. If you like what you see, there is a one-time charge through Stripe to convert everything.
I hope you find it useful, and I welcome any and all feedback on it!
Thanks for reading!
Are you keeping URLs stable? That was tricky for me IIRC, along with RSS.
(The very trickiest bit was probably specific to me. I still have inbound links with the page in a "/?p=3" kind of query param, which I think was the WordPress default 20-odd years ago. I didn't want to make the root URL for the site non-static to handle that, so I wound up putting some JS in my index page template that checks for that kind of thing. If it spots it, it changes window.location to a specific URL that is delegated a Flask site that knows where to redirect people. Link in bio if anyone wants to see how it works. I should probably blog about it sometime!)
If we are going to use JS, then you might as well put the redirects themselves in JS. Have a tiny stub of JS that detects the "/?p=xxx" case, which can then load the (presumably very large) list of redirects from a separate file and do the redirecting. That'll save you maintaining the extra service.
As for me, I moved from a Django app I made to a Hugo site, but it's pretty much the same deal. Because my Hugo site is on a "real" server (rather than e.g. GitHub Pages) I just have a giant pile of 500+ redirects in the nginx config file for the site (which is checked into the same repo as my Hugo site). It works for me.
That's super awesome too, this is not so different under the hood, I used libxml for getting the content and pandoc for converting -- pandoc turned out to be by far the best of the tools I tried for that aspect.
It won't necessarily keep the URLs stable, they'll be made based on the title of the post.
That's a cool solution for the ?p=<id> issues, this doesn't handle it but when I've done it for for sites I host I usually use nginx's rewrite rules. I think for query rewriting you need to additionally use the map directive, but I was only handling directory vs .html and things like that.
Thank you again for commenting, I like your site!
My service only converts the blog posts and pages themself and helps you get started on a conversion.
Was curious why you picked Hugo over something like Astro. I'm migrating a site off of Jekyll and have found Astro has a lot of interesting features if I want to use them but is at its heart a static site generator and seems to be a pretty easy lift to migrate to. Haven't done much evaluation of Hugo yet.
Really the reason I picked Hugo is because that's what the person I was talking to wanted. He'd only found contractors who would charge more than he wanted to pay to do a manual conversion, and said even something that just got his pages and posts over would be worthwhile to him.
I have more experience with Jekyll. In fact, I had tried to start a hosted platform with a CMS for it that I opened sourced a while back (https://github.com/symkat/MyJekyllBlog) but it never really got traction.
At this point I'm actively looking for a new job and figured getting this on Hacker News might be helpful for that.
I hadn't heard of Astro before, it looks neat!
Hopefully moving to a more actively supported static site generator will benefit us but its also a lesson to us that we need to keep track of continued support of apps we rely on. It's easy to just build and forget something and then there's a fire drill when you have to go back and change something that hasn't been re-deployed in a while.
WP lets me drag/drop or upload media very very easily. Has done for years.
Hugo? or indeed most SSG's?
https://gist.github.com/lewiscollard/c6651648d1c20144ed89e16...
Copy that into your "layouts/shortcodes/image.html" and use it as
{{< image src="my cat.jpg" alt="add a description here" >}}
Hope that helps!
Because isn't this just "WordPress 2 Markdown".
Unless I'm mistaken, this does not recreate your WordPress theme/template to be used in Hugo (nor nothing specific to Hugo).
It's just exporting your blog posts from WordPress database into a Markdown file format.
Note: still very useful, I just find the name confusing.
It does put your files into a Hugo directory structure and includes the smol theme. It doesn't recreate your theme, plugins, or process your images, but I also have tried to be very explicit that it just converts your pages and posts and is the starting point for a conversion.
When you put an export file through it, you'll end up on this page: https://imgur.com/a/UUMB6ve where you can download a zip or tgz of the site and you'll clearly understand what you're getting before you can choose if you want to have the remaining pages/posts converted.
Edit: 413 Request Entity Too Large.
I know but I'm still not happy about it. Also Hugo is not what I would call a WYSIWYG application like Wordpress, so...
Thanks for the 413 note! I've just upped the client_max_body_size if you want to give it a try again.