I wrote a while back about my love of WordPress but after my experiences this morning I am feeling a little less charitable. I am currently setting up a new site (spokenlikeageek.com) for which I had intended to use the latest build of WordPress (2.5). As part of this I wanted to transfer some existing entries from this blog and so I exported out all entries (the only option) and imported them into the new blog. This seemed to work well and, as an added bonus, also copied across all the files that had been uploaded as well. The next step was to delete the entries that I didn’t want which should have been easy to do through the admin interface. Problem is that I receive and error message which says there has been a problem with the deletion but, crucially, doesn’t tell you what the problem is. A quick search of the WordPress forums shows that others have had the same problem but there seems to be no fix.
At this point I decided that the best course of action was to install the previous stable build (2.3.3) and redo the transfer. Again the install was a breeze. This time I encountered a different problem in that not all my posts would import. I then spent a while checking a number of things from the size of the file to the format of the XML. A number of imports later and I am still no closer.
So I have a number of choice:
- import all items and not be able to delete them
- import only the items that WordPress decides
- move to some other blogging platform
- give up.
Right now I am going with the latter option while I do some more research on resolving one of the issues. When I find a solution I will post it.