Post-mortem for failed MT to WP migration

  • Probably beyond salvation, but posted for the benefit of science. Apologies for the post length.

    ——

    I can see that ‘importing from MT’ is a popular search term in these forums, so there’s a chance that my problem occurs elsewhere and has a handy fix. But after trying *quite hard* to find an answer, I’m stumped. Basically, the import process fails and doesn’t show the list of authors, even for a trivial file.

    Here’s the bullet:

    Pristine fresh install of Fedora Core 4, fully yum updated. That means: Linux 2.6.13, Apache 2.0.54, MySQL 4.1.14, PHP 5.0.4. WordPress 1.5.2 installed, configured for MySQL, can log in happily to the WP dashboard. Can see the ‘hello world’ post. So far, so good.

    Exported the blog from an MT 3.0D installation (and applied the am/pm fix). Old weblog has 1,165 posts and nearly 30,000 comments. Exported using Firefox 1.0.7 and saved to a handsome 18MB import.txt file. Bwoop! Bwoop! Yes, that’s big. Already tried those php.ini fixes …. the story continues. The weblog is written in Farsi but uses UTF-8 encoding exclusively throughout. The import.txt file looks fine in gedit, for instance.

    Modified the default import-mt to point to import.txt and ran it up in the browser. On clicking the ‘let’s go’ link … it did nothing, not even re-writing the URL to append the ?step=1 on the end. Firefox just says ‘Done’ in the status bar. Hunted around to see if there was an improved import script, found this reference to Carthik’s updated script:

    https://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2004/06/18/import-mt-bug-fix/

    which seemed to include a substitution for $step = $_GET[‘step’]; becoming $step = $HTTP_GET_VARS[‘step’];

    OK, that seems logical … maybe some PHP issue with not reading in a variable. So tried the new one, and Hey! the URL updates with ?step=1. But when I click ‘let’s go’ again … absolutely nothing. Browser twitches for a tenth of a second, then says ‘done’. Middle clicking to open in a new window reveals a null file: <html><body></body></html>.

    So at this point I did all the reading up and deduced it might be too large an import file. NB no signs from my server pointing to errors concerning ‘out of memory’. So I did a bit of digging around in the PHP installation. I checked the settings using phpinfo(), verified the php.ini location, found the resource limits section and put everything up to big, chunky settings (3000 seconds, 100MB memory). No dice – the ‘let’s go’ link still refusing to do anything. Restarted httpd. Still no dice. <windowsmagiccureall> Rebooted the server </windowsmagiccureall>. Still no dice. Verified that php errors were echoing to the screen (e.g. I deliberately broke a ‘require’ php command, and indeed got the errors I expected).

    OK, try splitting the file into tiny bits. No dice. Hmmm. Maybe it’s some weird problem with the Farsi langauge, so, tried just a SINGLE blog entry in plain English (actually, just the word ‘test’), and STILL clicking on the ‘let’s go’ link does a big. fat. zero.

    So I’m stumped. As well as being in a real Steve Ballmer throw-the-chair rage over all this. I guess I could try an MT database to WP database migration using WordPress version 1.2 (and mt2wp.php?), then upgrade to 1.5, but .. frankly .. I’m struggling to be bothered when really I have a perfectly good set up of MT and pretty good knowledge of the system. But it’s a shame, as WP looked pretty promising.

    I *would* recommend that you perform more cautious testing and much more on-screen progress indication during this stage as completely conking out with no feedback is going to throw anyone else who might bump in to this problem.

    Cheers

    Aegilops

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  • Yup, I’m having exactly the same problem.
    I’d love to have some docs about how to turnon some debugging.
    I’ve coded perl, and asp. but never PHP. So while i can understand most of teh code, inserting debugging statements is probably beyond my scope right now.

    So my questions are these:
    Is the format of data fixed? What I mean is I’ve looked at the data file that i made. It looks liek this:
    AUTHOR: xxxxxxx
    TITLE: This is a test
    DATE: xx/xx/xxxx 06:21:00 PM
    …
    …

    Is it OK for the AUTHOR field to come first? or should the title come first? Or does it not matter what the structure of the data is?

    It would be very cool if the import tool would, when it fails, tell you how many records it read, and show you the list of users that it read, so that you can start to eliminate problems.

    Thanks

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