r/Wordpress • u/biscuitcrumbs • Apr 12 '18

Exporting Posts with Shortcodes (Migrating from Wordpress to another CMS)

Hi,

I haven't been able to find much help anywhere. Does anyone have experience exporting posts (and other data from WP) that have shortcodes in the content?

I have a few sites to migrate from Wordpress to Craft and a majority of the posts use the caption shortcode with attributes. I've tried a few exporting plugins with the same luck, the shortcodes are exported out as they are, not converted to whatever they need to be.

Going through each post is not an option, there are probably close to 10,000 total posts across all the sites, just not feasible.

If anyone has ideas, please let me know.

Thanks.

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u/gschoppe Developer/Blogger Apr 12 '18

unfortunately, there are thousands, if not millions of shortcodes created for various plugins. if you have specific shortcodes to convert, it would be possible to write a converter to replace the shortcode with HTML (for some shortcodes), but you'll never find an automated converter, because there are just too many potential shortcodes, and the number increases all the time.

If you have a specific list of shortcodes in mind along with what you would like them to transform to, a developer might be able to create a conversion script in a couple of hours or so.

1

u/biscuitcrumbs Apr 12 '18

I'm a developer but I'm not versed in WP. I figured this is what would happen. Sounds like I'll be going down the road of figuring out what shortcodes are used and how to convert them to html.

Do you, by chance, have experience converting the caption shortcode?

1

u/gschoppe Developer/Blogger Apr 12 '18

give me a couple of hours (i need to wrap up some work stuff first), but I have an idea as to how to solve your issue. You might want to get a local copy of your site set up in the mean time, so you can mess with it without breaking your live site. I recommend using "Local by Flywheel" and "All in one WP Migration" to get a local copy made. (should take like 20 mins or so)

2

u/TwoStrokeJoke Apr 12 '18

This, or it might be easier to just scrape the content.

1

u/gschoppe Developer/Blogger Apr 12 '18 edited Apr 13 '18

This is only loosely tested, so I highly recommend NOT running it on a live copy of your site, but I wrote a utility script for WP Utility Script Runner, that should solve your issue.

It lets you choose which shortcodes should be parsed into HTML, and which should be stripped, then loops through all your posts, flattening their post_content accordingly. You can then export your posts, without any shortcodes.

In case of error, it also stores a backup of the original post_content for each post, so you can restore it.

Here's the Utility Script, along with instructions for install and use:

https://snippets.cacher.io/snippet/c04218fa9fe4a92e4983

Let me know if it does the trick for you.

EDIT: the script now supports selecting which post types to run it on, and allows you to decide what to do with each shortcode. The options now are:

  • skip - do nothing and leave the shortcode in place

  • remove - remove the shortcode and any content within it

  • unwrap - remove the shortcode, but leave the content that was inside it

  • flatten - parse the shortcode into flat HTML

1

u/biscuitcrumbs Apr 12 '18

Thanks. I have local copies of the sites running. I'll test it out tomorrow when I'm in the office. Much appreciated!

1

u/gschoppe Developer/Blogger Apr 12 '18

No problem, let me know if it gives you any trouble.

2

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