by jmrodri

jroller to WordPress migration

I got bored with the interface of roller on jroller.com, I decided to switch to WordPress. One of the features I love about WordPress is the import/export feature. But I needed a way to export my existing roller blog (a feature that isn’t yet implemented in roller).

A little googling for migrate roller weblogger to wordpress led me to this article: Migrating a Roller blog to WordPress. The author’s custom template works for generic RSS. While WordPress can use this format, I had better success using the WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) format.

As the author states

“…because while WordPress can import posts from your feed it cannot import the post comments. Nothing against WordPress, the RSS 2.0 specification does allow a comments subelement but that can only be a link to the actual comments page. So basically we need to defy them all, add the comments inline in our custom RSS Feed and then modify the wordpress RSS Import Utility to decipher and import the comments as well.”

with my modifications you don’t have to modify the wordpress importer at all, which means you can use this on wordpress.com as well.

Here is what I did:

  • add a new template, “WordPress export” add new template
  • click the edit icon next to the template
  • change the Link to “wpexport.xml”
  • paste in this template
  • click Save button
  • click Done button
  • Proceed to download

Now you are ready to download the xml file and import into WordPress.

wget http://jroller.com/page/*your_blog_name*/wpexport.xml

Once you have the xml file, import into WordPress

12 thoughts on “jroller to WordPress migration”

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  3. This is very helpful!
    I’m just trying to migrate from jroller to wordpress. But I can’t get your custom template file from the link any more. Could you send me a copy to houyongr(at)gmail.com? Thank you!

    Reply
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  7. Thanks for the tips. It really helped me. I was wondering why it only showed 15 entries, even though my blog had around 32. I then set the maximum displayed t o 30 (under settings – it wouldn’t allow me to set beyond this) and got 30 entries successfully ported.

    Reply
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  9. I won’t be using JRoller anymore after I kept getting a site offline messages for over a number of important occasions when I needed it.

    WordPress rocks!

    Reply

  11. Hi I am migrating to my personal WordPress blog.

    Is there a way to get more than 30 entries in the wpexport.xml? Can you parameterise the URL query or the template?

    It is really frustrating that Jroller blog has no export blog entry features. It will make me think twice before investing in a blogging platform.

    I will probably have to get the Roller Manual and look explicitly for velocity templates. Ahh!!!

    Thanks in advance

    Reply

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