Wordpress won’t import your categories? Here’s how to fix it.
If you’re like me and you’re busily trying to move blogs between hosts, you might be running into some Wordpress import problems. You’re also discovering that the Wordpress inport function is a little bit broken. If you’re reading this, then you’re also discovering just how badly documented these problems are in the support communities for Wordpress. Here’s my contribution: the things I did to make my transition work.
If your wordpress WXR import is hanging and dying, just keep refreshing the page. Wordpress won’t load duplicate entries, so you don’t have to worry about submitting the document multiple times. Keep refreshing until you see an alert at the bottom that says “All done. Have fun!” or something to that effect, along with a link to your blog’s front page.
The other major problem I had was with importing categories. The categories would be listed in the appropriate posts, and the categories would be listed under the “category” tab, but the categories in the tab would show zero instances of that category being used. So, your categories are there, but there’s a disconnect over where they are. The solution proved to be dead simple: before you delete the “Hello World!” post from your new installation of Wordpress, go in and edit it. You want to go and assign that post to every category you have available to you, and save the post. Once you go back out to your blog, you’ll see all the categories are associated with all the posts they should, and everything is now right as rain.You can now go in and delete “Hello World!”
Hopefully, you’ll read this and save more time than I did figuring it out.
Hello man! So, see, i’ve done that, and yeap! It works for categories, but not for tags! The logic would be assign the post to every tag, but i’ve got more then 9.000 tags!
Do you have a solution? Thanks a lot!
I’m afraid not. If I had that problem, I’d start hunting for a meta-info extractor, either a utility or a plugin and see if I couldn’t get all my tags in one place, and then I’d have something to plug into a temporary post.
Beyond that, I have no idea. Good luck.
Hmm, ok, I opened a topic on Wordpress.org Forum: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/251873. Let’s see if anyone else know how to fix it.
Thanks!
This was SOOO helpful! Thank you. My import kept stopping short. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and the refresh took so long I didn’t think it was doing anything at first. After finding your post, I tried it again, and it worked! Yay!
That’s great, Melinda, glad I could help! And also, yay for the gremlins of the internet making this findable for people who need help making their sites go.
Thank you very much! Your tip is perfect. I was afraid I should start the new installation from the beginning, because I had deleted the “Hello world” article before reading your post. But it works also by generating a temporary post at any time of the installation.
Not found the solution for the tags… I will share it if I do!
hgsvn
Thank you, this was great. I had already deleted the first post, but creating a new post and assigning it to all categories fixed the problem. I used a nice “toggle checkboxes” bookmarklet http://lifehacker.com/5218436/toggle-em-all-makes-check-boxes-hassle-free to make it faster.
Any news about how to fix this with tags? I can hack the database if need be. Thanks!
I’VE BEEN TRYING TO SOLVE THIS ISSUE FOR TWO YEARS NOW. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT WAS THIS ELEMENTARY! THANKS SO MUCH FOR THIS!
- ARH