Migrating a SPIP (version 3) website to a Wordpress website: any existing software ?

Question

I have to find a way to import website based upon SPIP 3 to a wordpress site. Both sites do already exist, and the ancient site (SPIP3) contains approximately a thousand articles, in about 10 categories, written by ten authors or so (it's an association site). Is it possible to find a software efficient to do so? Thank you in advance for your answer if you know about that.

Answer 1

I was looking for this kind of software too a few weeks ago.

I found this post https://www.fredericgilles.net/tutorial-migrate-spip-to-wordpress/ It is a WordPress Plugin with two versions:

• Free version (it imports only posts, categories and images)
• Premium version (it imports in additional authors, it implements SEO URL editing, ...)

I've tried yet the free version and it's worked for me (my SPIP version was the 3.1 one).

Answer 2

At first, make a backup of your old website using SPIP, SPIP 3 supports at least two formats : sqlite and XML (with compression packaged as a .gz archive or without compression). This is explained here. Personally, I use XML without compression.

Then, access your (s)ftp account, go into /spip/html/tmp/dump to find and download your backup file. You can do that in command line or by using FileZilla.

After that, look at the beginning of your backup file, it tells you where your logos, your documents and your images are stored. Access your (s)ftp account again to find and download them.

Finally, upload your logos, your images and your documents into your Wordpress media library. The trickiest part consists in converting your SPIP backup file into a RSS 2 Wordpress XML file. If you don't want to deal with this conversion, maybe you can try WP All Import (open source Wordpress plugin). Otherwise, when you have a RSS 2 Wordpress XML file, you can use the official Wordpress Importer plugin exactly like you would do to import the content of another Wordpress website.

I have to explain to the motivated developers how to convert SPIP XML into RSS 2.0 XML for Wordpress. Each SPIP version may use a different syntax. I advise you to use XSLT to perform the conversion but it's possible to obtain a similar result by parsing the former, make your own processing and write the latter, this is what I do with Java Stax API. You have to look for spip_articles to get your articles for example. The exact term for the format used by Wordpress is "WordPress eXtended RSS". You'll have to convert the SPIP syntax into a subset of (X)HTML supported by Wordpress too.