Importing an existing site

Description

pelican-import is a command-line tool for converting articles from other software to reStructuredText or Markdown. The supported import formats are:

  • Blogger XML export

  • Dotclear export

  • Medium export

  • Tumblr API

  • WordPress XML export

  • RSS/Atom feed

The conversion from HTML to reStructuredText or Markdown relies on Pandoc. For Dotclear, if the source posts are written with Markdown syntax, they will not be converted (as Pelican also supports Markdown).

Note

Unlike Pelican, Wordpress supports multiple categories per article. These are imported as a comma-separated string. You have to resolve these manually, or use a plugin such as More Categories that enables multiple categories per article.

Note

Imported pages may contain links to images that still point to the original site. So you might want to download those images into your local content and manually re-link them from the relevant pages of your site.

Dependencies

pelican-import has some dependencies not required by the rest of Pelican:

  • BeautifulSoup4 and lxml, for WordPress and Dotclear import. Can be installed like any other Python package (pip install BeautifulSoup4 lxml).

  • Feedparser, for feed import (pip install feedparser).

  • Pandoc, see the Pandoc site for installation instructions on your operating system.

Usage

pelican-import [-h] [--blogger] [--dotclear] [--tumblr] [--wpfile] [--feed]
               [-o OUTPUT] [-m MARKUP] [--dir-cat] [--dir-page] [--strip-raw] [--wp-custpost]
               [--wp-attach] [--disable-slugs] [-b BLOGNAME]
               input|api_key

Positional arguments

input

The input file to read

api_key

(Tumblr only) api_key can be obtained from https://www.tumblr.com/oauth/apps

Optional arguments

-h, --help

Show this help message and exit

--blogger

Blogger XML export (default: False)

--dotclear

Dotclear export (default: False)

--medium

Medium export (default: False)

--tumblr

Tumblr API (default: False)

--wpfile

WordPress XML export (default: False)

--feed

Feed to parse (default: False)

-o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT

Output path (default: content)

-m MARKUP, --markup MARKUP

Output markup format: rst, markdown, or asciidoc (default: rst)

--dir-cat

Put files in directories with categories name (default: False)

--dir-page

Put files recognised as pages in “pages/” sub- directory (blogger and wordpress import only) (default: False)

--filter-author

Import only post from the specified author

--strip-raw

Strip raw HTML code that can’t be converted to markup such as flash embeds or iframes (default: False)

--wp-custpost

Put wordpress custom post types in directories. If used with –dir-cat option directories will be created as “/post_type/category/” (wordpress import only)

--wp-attach

Download files uploaded to wordpress as attachments. Files will be added to posts as a list in the post header and links to the files within the post will be updated. All files will be downloaded, even if they aren’t associated with a post. Files will be downloaded with their original path inside the output directory, e.g. “output/wp-uploads/date/postname/file.jpg”. (wordpress import only) (requires an internet connection)

--disable-slugs

Disable storing slugs from imported posts within output. With this disabled, your Pelican URLs may not be consistent with your original posts. (default: False)

-b BLOGNAME, --blogname=BLOGNAME

Blog name used in Tumblr API

Examples

For Blogger:

$ pelican-import --blogger -o ~/output ~/posts.xml

For Dotclear:

$ pelican-import --dotclear -o ~/output ~/backup.txt

For Medium:

$ pelican-import --medium -o ~/output ~/medium-export/posts/

The Medium export is a zip file. Unzip it, and point this tool to the “posts” subdirectory. For more information on how to export, see https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004745787-Export-your-account-data.

For Tumblr:

$ pelican-import --tumblr -o ~/output --blogname=<blogname> <api_key>

For WordPress:

$ pelican-import --wpfile -o ~/output ~/posts.xml

For Medium (an example of using an RSS feed):

$ python -m pip install feedparser $ pelican-import –feed https://medium.com/feed/@username

Note

The RSS feed may only return the most recent posts — not all of them.

Tests

To test the module, one can use sample files: