Cutenews to WordPress Conversion – Part 2

I completely forgot to write about this a while ago. I figured I’d just give you a summary of what I did to convert one of my websites from Cutenews to WordPress. After having some success another way, I found the process to be much more difficult than I would have liked it to be.

Then I found something that I was surprised to find, but also very happy to find: FlatPress.

Cutenews, as you may know, works with flat files. Very quick for accessing data, and requires no database to do so.

FlatPress is the same, but also looks and works like WordPress (2.x).

What I did was found a conversion path from Cutenews to FlatPress. I believe it was a cutenews importer, and may have been built in to FlatPress.

Then I found a FlatPress to WordPress converter, and made sure to look at all of the data before I added it to the database. There were some times when the data may not have lined up with the new database, that would have caused a lot of problems. So as long as you are careful with it, you’ll have a shiny new database with all of your news, imported from Cutenews or even FlatPress if that was your system of choice.

To those using Cutenews.RU, sorry I don’t have a way to do that, and haven’t had to do that, but if you find a way to do it, feel free to comment about it.

Sorry about the lack of detail for what to look for.  I did the conversion a couple of years ago.  I’m pretty sure that it’s all still very possible.  In fact, it’s likely that more tutorials exist for how to move from one system to another at this point.

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Cutenews to WordPress Conversion

cutenews-logo

In my search to convert the flat file format of Cutenews over to the database driven WordPress, I came across a plugin that someone was creating.  This news transfer tool is called Other-Ext-WP.

I was pretty excited to find it, as I want to move two of my websites off of Cutenews and into the more secure database driven format.  It worked okay when I tried it out to see what it would do.  It did pull in the stories as well as some of the categories and the dates.

wordpress-logoHowever, there are a number of issues with the importing, however, that have been reported by others as well.

1) The Categories don’t transfer correctly.

2) The Full Story doesn’t transfer, just the short story field.

3) You can only attribute the stories to one user.

4) It strips out all mark-up.  In both stories and comments.

I’m not too worried about moving the uploaded pictures over, as that can be fixed later.  But I would love to have a working script to run that will properly convert things.

The latest WordPress version that the creator says that it works in is 2.3.1, so I tried that to see if it worked, and that’s where the issues came in.  The person developing it appears to have given up on the plugin, so I’m asking for anyone that has some spare time to help out if you can.

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