Categories lost after importing a new blog
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I just imported by blog http://equalsdrummond.name to WordPress.com (it had previously been self-hosted on another server running WordPress, from which an admin helped me do the export and then import into WordPress.com). Everything worked smoothly except after the import, I noticed that: a) all the Categories show in my Dashboard, but not on the blog itself (it says “No Categories”), and b) all the posts are now uncategorized, whereas on the previous installation, all posts were categoried.
Since the blog goes back to January 2005, with almost 400 posts, it would be a huge amount of work to recategorize everything.
So I have two questions:
1) Did we do something wrong in the export/import process (we selected to export everything from the old blog, and repeated the process twice just to make sure)?
2) If not, and I need to recategorize all the posts, what do I need to do to get the Categories that show in my Dashboard to display on the blog?
Thanks in advance for your help.
=Drummond
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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1) You did nothing wrong. You need to contact staff though as apparently there are some issues with the import lately and it is somehow dropping the categories off of the posts. Contact staff at http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/ .
2) Don’t start doing this till after you hear from staff as this might be something they can fix in the backend without you having to re-categorize all your posts. If that does become necessary though, you will have to open each post in the editor, add the categories to the post, and then update the post. Rinse and repeat.
This is something that staff need to fix as you are not the first having issues with importing and losing stuff. The importer seems quite broken right now.
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@thesacredpath, that’s super-helpful. I was wondering if I should dive in and start fixing, but I haven’t done anything yet, so I’ll contact support right now. And if I learn anything helpful, I’ll post it back here.
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It’s 10:49PM Pacific Time, i.e. 1 day since I posted the question and then contacted staff as @thesacredpath suggested. I’m holding off from doing anything to my blog until I find out if there’s a way to fix this.
Any idea how long I should wait to hear back from staff?
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Usually one day is plenty of time. I’d ping them again if I were you. And check your junk email folder, because sometimes their responses go there.
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@drummondreed, I had contacted staff, and they are aware of the issues and are working on a fix. What they told me was if you can roll the self-hosted blog back to wordpress 3.0 and then export, the import will work and everything will come in as it should. I’ve not tried this so I cannot verify that it works, but staff said it did.
As far as when staff will get back to you I can’t say, but if you cannot do the rollback to 3.0, ask if they can do the import for you. Perhaps they have a way on the backend to get things in correctly.
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@raincoaster, thanks for the guidance. No sign of email in the spam folder yet. But…
@thesacredpath, I can’t thank you enough for passing that advice on. I don’t have direct access to the old blog, but I’ll forward your advice to the admin right now and see if he can make it work. I’ll post the outcome either way.
Again, thanks very much for your help. I’d sure love to get those 6 years of categories back ;-)
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Okay, here’s the resolution: the admin for my old blog did roll it back to WordPress 3.0, exported it, and was able to successfully import it here with all categories intact. The only elements that did not import properly were media files, and on that score it was funky — images in my posts after some date in 2009 were left out, but images in my posts prior to that date were successfully imported (although they don’t show up in my Media Library for some reason).
It’s all very strange, but since I hadn’t used very many images, and still had access to the old blog, it took me only about a half hour to manually download and reupload and reinsert the images that didn’t transfer.
So everything is finally reassembled properly and I”m a happy WordPress.com customer. I don’t want to think about how many hours it would have taken to recategorize the 209 posts (given that I’ve always categorized very carefully).
One more pleasant surprise: in the conversion, all my old posts, which just used the WordPress post numbers for permalinks (I never turned on slugs) were automatically given slugs. This of course nearly gave me a heart attack because I thought that links pointing to the old URLs that just used post numbers might be broken. But then I tested it and, of course, the old links work fine, they just auto-redirect to the new URL with the slug.
That’s pretty slick.
So, morals of the story:
1) At present, to import from another WordPress blog here to WordPress.com, rollback your old WordPress installation to 3.0 and then import from that (and expect some funky treatment of media files).
2) Ask the good folks in this forum for help because they can get you great answers even faster than support!
A special shout-out to @thesacredpath for steering me straight to the solution.
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On the posts, each post has an ID number, so when wordpress sees that ID # being requested, it knows where to find the post and then displays the SEF URL instead. WordPress is pretty smart about other imports as well and most times, as long is there is some tidbit in the old URL for wordpress to go on, it can find the correct post to display (such as when coming from blogger to wordpress).
I’m glad that the rollback (mostly) worked out for you and was glad to help. At least we were able to cut down on the amount of work you had to do.
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