Importing Wordpress posts to another system using the exported XML file

I recently moved away from Wordpress to my own system, one of the challenges I faced was moving my posts from Wordpress into my own system. I found using the exported XML file was the easiest way to achieve this.

Upon first looking at the XML file I thought using SimpleXML would be the easiest approach. My first attempt enabled me to see the details of the post but the post content and excerpt proved to be a little harder to extract.

The reason for this Wordpress uses namespaces with in the XML feed meaning doing a simple lookup would not work the posts needed to be looped through and extracted separately or using a different namespace lookup.

Searching Google I found a brilliant class on Gists by James King https://gist.github.com/Jamesking56/4773838

<?php


/**
* WordPress class - Manages the WordPress XML file and gets all data from that.
*/
class Wordpress
{
    public static $wpXML;

    function __construct($wpXML)
    {
        $this->wpXML = $wpXML;
    }

    public function getPosts()
    {
        $xml = simplexml_load_file($this->wpXML);
        $posts = array();

        foreach($xml->channel->item as $item)
        {
            $categories = array();
            foreach($item->category as $category)
            {
                //echo $category['domain'];
                if($category['nicename'] != "uncategorized" && $category['domain'] == "category")
                {
                    //echo 'Yep';
                    $categories[] = $category['nicename'];
                }
            }

            $content = $item->children('http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/');
            
            $posts[] = array(
                "title"=>$item->title,
                "content"=>$content->encoded,
                "pubDate"=>$item->pubDate,
                "categories"=>implode(",", $categories),
                "slug"=>str_replace("/", "", str_replace("http://blog.jamesking56.co.uk/", "", $item->guid))
            );
        }

        return $posts;
    }
}

?>

This class is written very well and got me nearly everything I needed apart from the post's excerpt that was missing from the class but luckily adding that was a simple process. I only needed to add another namespace definition and store that to a variable.

$excerpt = $item->children('http://wordpress.org/export/1.2/excerpt/');

The class collects the posts adds them to an array and returns the array, This is fine but I wanted to add the posts to the database inside the class rather then getting an array and looping through it again.

A simple change was needed in the class I passed my database reference ($db) then as the array is created I can pass that to the database in one motion.

$wp = new Wordpress('sitename.xml',$db);
$posts = $wp->getPosts();

My final class looks like this:

class Wordpress
{
    public $wpXML;
    public $db;
 
    function __construct($wpXML,$db)
    {
        $this->wpXML = $wpXML;
        $this->db = $db;
    }

    private function _slug($text){ 

      // replace non letter or digits by -
      $text = preg_replace('~[^\pLd]+~u', '-', $text);

      // trim
      $text = trim($text, '-');

      // transliterate
      $text = iconv('utf-8', 'us-ascii//TRANSLIT', $text);

      // lowercase
      $text = strtolower($text);

      // remove unwanted characters
      $text = preg_replace('~[^-w]+~', '', $text);

      if (empty($text))
      {
        return 'n-a';
      }

      return $text;
    }
 
    public function getPosts()
    {
        $xml = simplexml_load_file($this->wpXML);
        $posts = array();
 
        foreach($xml->channel->item as $item)
        {
            $categories = array();
            foreach($item->category as $category)
            {
                //echo $category['domain'];
                if($category['nicename'] != "uncategorized" && $category['domain'] == "category")
                {
                    //echo 'Yep';
                    $categories[] = $category['nicename'];
                }
            }
 
            $content = $item->children('http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/');
            $excerpt = $item->children('http://wordpress.org/export/1.2/excerpt/');

                

            $post = array(
                "postTitle"=>$item[0]->title,
                "postSlug"=>$this->_slug($item[0]->title),
                "postCont"=>htmlentities($content->encoded),
                "postDesc"=>htmlentities($excerpt->encoded),
                "postDate"=> strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", strtotime($item[0]->pubDate))
            );

            $this->db->insert("blog",$post);
        }
 
        //return $posts;
    }
}

$wp = new Wordpress('sitename.xml',$db);
$posts = $wp->getPosts();