TextPress Development Blog

Thanks to the excellent importer framework in TextPress, it is relatively easy to write an importer for any arbitrary data. The system allows for importing posts, comments, labels, authors, and these make up a complete blog. The blog is enqueued and the admin can decide which components of the blog to actually import.

So all an importer needs to be able to do is instantiate textpress.importers.Blog (with the data), and call enqueue_dump on the instance. TextPress takes care of the rest.

The importer for Blogger.com was not a particular technical challenge, especially that Google have made available a Python client library for accessing their GData-based applications.

The process is:

1. Authenticate with Google
2. Grab and parse feeds of posts and comments
3. Ask TextPress to dump the data

Interested in creating your own importer? Check out textpress/importers/, the base code is in __init__.py and the existing importers are there to use as examples.

You won’t believe it but TextPress can now import blog posts from another blog software. In that case WordPress which was the most important importer for the moment. After that we try to focus on blogger and some other online services, hopefully that is finished before the 0.1 release. The adventures that lead to the working importer can be found in my blog ;-)

Anyways. We sucessfully imported three blogs (mine, s0undt3ch’s and mikas), one with a dump of roughly 7 megabytes and four years of entries. Here a screenshot as proof: