Importing Blogs Into Drupal

Any of these three will probably do it for you: Planet, Aggregator2, News Page.

I didnt know that this could be done, I use drupal I think its a great program for what I need.

Hmm... Let me clarify. I'm not actually looking to aggregrate. I will be migrating the data from bBlog to Drupal. Then bBlog will be uninstalled, including deletion of tables and such.

Wordpress actually allows you to use the RSS feed for migration. If you're changing from some weird blogging software (say, bBlog) to Wordpress, an RSS feed can be used for easy migration. It's this kind of migration tool, but for Drupal, that I'm looking for.

I don't believe there is a utility for migrating from bBlog in particular, though others exist. You may have to write it yourself. The migration guide could help.

Generally, you can also import XML/CSV or CSV to nodes, but I've never tried it and don't know if it's functionally equivalent to the Wordpress RSS tool. If it isn't, it seems like not much work to modify one of them to suit.

Or maybe if you're feeling adventurous you could try importing to Wordpress from bBlog, and then to Drupal from Wordpress.

I have no problem with using 2 steps and 2 tools. Thanks for the link, Abhishek!

No problem. Be sure to post your results here too. It would be interesting to know how well chaining import tools works.

Well, the deed was done last night. You can see the results at http://www.getasiteonline.com. I would give you the link for the old version, but bBlog doesn't seem to work now that I moved the domain over. Glad I moved away from it...

I used Wordpress's built in ability to import any RSS feed of a blog. This meant that I lost all comments. But bBlog had been screwing up my comments table, and someone just one survived anyway. So I manually copied that one over to Drupal later.

After that, I used this Drupal module to import the Wordpress blog into Drupal. That module, wp2drupal, requires several things, including that iconved be enabled on your PHP server. It wasn't on mine and I couldn't control that, so I went into the code of wp2drupal and tweaked the code so it didn't check for that and didn't use it later. In my case, it still worked fine.

Here are some things I noticed that happened during one of the two steps. I'm not sure in which of the two steps all of these happened, though I have some ideas on some of them.

• My comments did not import from bBlog to WP (already mentioned)
• bBlog has topics/categories like most blogs. They let you specify the name in plain English and the internally used name that is all lowercase with no spaces. Somehow the internal one is the one that got exported. No biggie, as you can globally change those in Drupal, affecting all your posts at once.
• Many (most) attributes of the img and div tags I used in posts were stripped out. I've not finished going through all the posts, but the alignment of my images are mostly messed up. I use CSS to align them (and to give the side up against the text some padding), and that was gone. With centered images, I tended to use a div and either use CSS or align="center". All the CSS was gone. On some of the entries the align attribute was gone, but not on all. Weird.
• I forgot in Drupal to specify to show all of the post without cutting it off with a "Show More" link. So now I have to go back through and edit each post once to get rid of that cut-off.
• The date on the posts is right, but when I go to Administer > Content the date is the date I imported them. Weird.

That's all I've noticed so far. I'll post more if I run into anything else.

Ah, that sounds like a reasonably successful migration given all the things that frequently go wrong in such a process. Great report.

I suspect the "show more" setting on posts is held in a field in the database. That means you should be able to run a single SQL UPDATE statement to fix it, rather than editing each manually.