So you want to change your blogging platform from Blogger to Word Press eh? Thankfully Word Press has a great feature to help you with this change but first lets get down to basics. I'm going to assume you are already using a custom domain and have your own hosting provider. If not.. then I would suggest taking care of those first and for most. Unless of course you just want to use Word Press on there server. If your not going to use your own domain/host then create your account at http://www.wordpress.com. Once you have created your account and have logged into the admin portion of your blog follow these steps to move your blog from Blogger to Word Press. Instructions. 1. From your dashboard click Manage 2. On the manage screen you will see some more menu options appear under the main options. Click import. 3. On the import screen you will see a list of different blogging platform's you can import from (Blogger is the first option). Make sure you are logged into your blogger account before you click import. 4. Click on Blogger and when the page loads it should display the name's of the blogs you have with Blogger. 5. Simply click the import button beside your blog of choice and presto magico it should start importing. If you are using your own hosting the steps are the exactly the same. The only difference is you will have to download Word Press to your computer and then upload all the files to your hosting account via FTP. You will also have to create a MYSQL database. To download Word Press you will need to visit http://wordpress.org/download/ Word Press installation. (Read Me file is available in the Word Press folder if you need to read it again) 1. Unzip the package in an empty directory. 2. Open up wp-config-sample.php with a text editor like WordPad or similar and fill in your database connection details. 3. Save the file as wp-config.php 4. Upload everything. 5. Open /wp-admin/install.php in your browser. This should setup the tables needed for your blog. If there is an error, double check your wp-config.php file, and try again. If it fails again, please go to the support forums with as much data as you can gather. 6. Note the password given to you. 7. The install script should then send you to the login page. Sign in with the username admin and the password generated during the installation. You can then click on 'Profile' to change the password. After you have successfully installed Word Press and are viewing your blog from the admin screen you can then follow the above mentioned steps to import your blog from Blogger. When I first tried to install Word Press on my own host and import from Blogger I came across an issue and was unable to use the import feature that is provided from Word Press. Apparently some host's wont allow scripts to contact outside sources. Fortunately I did some searches and found a solution. The Solution. 1. Create an account at WordPress.com. 2. Log-in to your admin dashboard and also log in to your Blogger dashboard. 3. Select manage and click on import. 4. Select Blogger and import your blog. 5. Once successfully imported click on export. 6. Download the export file. 7. Go back to the admin dashboard of your self hosted blog. 8. Click on manage and then click import. Then look at the bottom and click Word Press. 9. Browse for your recently saved Word Press .xml file (Will have Word Press in the file name). After all that is said and done your articles and comments should all be included in to your new Word Press blog. Hopefully the switch between Blogger and Word Press is a nice smooth transition. The longest part of the transition for me was waiting for the host/domain to point to the blog properly.
This is a great write-up desilator. One thing I had never thought of was importing to a free wordpress blog and then to the local installation. That would do wonders for many situations.
I am glad you liked my post. Hopefully it will assist you if you are thinking from switching to word press from blogger.
lolz, I think this will help many people. Personally I already knew how, just never thought of transferring to a free wordpress account to avoid certain restrictions.
Thanks for this write up - I have made the switch a while back - and did not know about these capabilities (though it was almost 2 years ago - so maybe they did not exist then)... but this is another excellent idea from wordpress - and very good to get the word out!!