Convert Your iWeb Blog To A WordPress Blog

August 30th, 2011

Since MobileMe is being discontinued, and the fate of iWeb is still up in the air, iWeb users have begun looking for alternatives for building their websites. There is no reason to panic, as long as you have iWeb on your Mac, you will still be able to edit your website.

iWeb users who publish their site to MobileMe may need to start looking for an alternative iWeb hosting company. As well, users who use iWeb’s blogging feature with comments enabled, might be out of luck with MobileMe’s departure.

Enter RAGE Software. We have developed a new tool, which we call “iWeb To WordPress”. With this new tool, you will be able to easily convert your iWeb blog posts, along with comments, to a WordPress blog. This means you will be able to continue blogging (more conveniently for that matter) and not have to worry about losing your comments.

To visualize how this tool works, and the simple steps involved, watch the video tutorial below.

We also offer iWeb and WordPress web hosting. Nobody supports iWeb like we do. We can get you all set up in just minutes for one low price and we have many free video tutorials to help you make the switch.

Video Transcript:

With Apple’s recent announcement of the discontinuation of MobileMe, iWeb users who rely on publishing their website to MobileMe with blog comments enabled will no longer be able to have those comments using iWeb’s blogging feature.

To combat this issue, we are introducing a new tool that will allow you to transfer your iWeb blog posts along with your users’ comments to WordPress. This means that you will be able to continue using iWeb as you normally do, and you will still be able to have your users make comments on your blog.

The first thing we have to do is export our website by publishing to a local folder in iWeb. Make sure your MobileMe URL has been entered in the URL field here. To make things easy, I am publishing the folder to my desktop. You can do the same if you’d like.

Now that the folder has been published, I am going to drag and drop it onto the iWeb To WordPress tool. When the Ready For Export message appears, click on the Export button and save the blog-feed. I am also going to save this to my desktop.

The next part of the tutorial is importing this file to WordPress. This part of the tutorial assumes you already have WordPress installed. Of course this might not be true for some of you watching this video for the first time. If that is the case, there is an instructional video showing you how to setup a WordPress blog on your RAGE Web Hosting account. That tutorial can be found at ragesw.com/webhosting.php . If you do not have a RAGE Web Hosting account, and want to get one, you can register for one at that same address.

So let’s import our blog and comments. In your WordPress Dashboard, click on Tools and then Import, followed by WordPress. If this Install Importer popup appears, click on Install Now. Then click on Activate Plugin & Run Importer. Then press the Choose File button, and locate your blog feed. Then press the Upload File and Import button. You might notice that it says Failed to import author. Don’t worry about that, this is normal. Press the Submit button, and you’re all set. You can now view your blog posts by visiting your website.

One last tip I want to give you, is to make sure you link to your blog on your website. A simple text link will allow your users to easily find your blog and continue reading. Linking back from your blog to your website is also a great idea.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 at 11:35 pm and is filed under iWeb Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Bruno Says:
September 12th, 2011 at 7:18 am

That’s interesting.
Are the others pages of an iWeb website converted too in the WordPress site?

Bruno

paul Says:
September 13th, 2011 at 11:44 am

No, only iWeb blog posts. It is impossible to convert iWeb pages to WordPress automatically unfortunately.

Zach Says:
September 13th, 2011 at 4:27 pm

I purchased this and used it to transfer my iWeb site to WordPress, but none of the pictures from the blog entries transferred, nor did any of the comments. Any suggestions on how to remedy this?

paul Says:
September 13th, 2011 at 7:09 pm

Because of how iWeb adds images to blog posts it is impossible to transfer this. We tried, it just isn’t possible. In fact, getting comments from your iWeb blog was extremely difficult to implement. Apple made it very hard for people to transfer their blog. iWeb to WordPress will do most of the process for you, except for images unfortunately.

Zach Says:
September 13th, 2011 at 11:22 pm

Thanks for the reply Paul. My comments are not being imported either. Any ideas on how to reconcile that?

Greg Says:
September 17th, 2011 at 3:41 pm

It doesn’t seem to have gotten the comments from my website either when I tried this. It’s nice to have automatically pulled in the posts, but the comments are important too and advertised as part of the converter.

I followed the instructions pretty carefully and am seeing all the correct url’s come up for the blog entries while saying “Getting comments for:”, but no comments are included in the xml file, only posts.

Any ideas why it’s not working?

Thanks.

paul Says:
September 17th, 2011 at 4:39 pm

@Greg: The previous posters issue with comments has been fixed with a version we re-uploaded to our site. So you may want to try re-downloading again.

The only other reason your blog comments won’t be retrieved is because you entered your MobileMe URL incorrectly in iWeb when saving your site to a local folder.

If you still have problems, please email us and we will figure out the solution for you.

Greg Says:
September 19th, 2011 at 10:17 am

Thanks Paul – which version is the one for which this should work?

I strongly suspect it’s not the other reason you mention, since the urls coming across the screen during the “Getting comments for:” section correctly lead to the relevant blog entry on the website.

I’ll give a re-download a try and let you know.

Thanks,
Greg

Aline Says:
September 29th, 2011 at 3:42 pm

I have got as far as a window saying EXPORT. I have clicked on that, and chosen where. Then nothing happens. What am I supposed to do, in order to import the file just “exported” into WordPress?

paul Says:
October 9th, 2011 at 2:02 am

@Aline: Your blog feed file is now saved in the location your selected. The video describes how to import it into WordPress.

Jeroen Says:
December 5th, 2011 at 10:31 am

I just purchased the iWeb to WordPress converter. Everything seemed to work fine, but…
It only exported the blogarchive, not the content of the blog posts. What can I do to get the content into the WP Blog?

paul Says:
December 7th, 2011 at 4:41 pm

What do you mean it only exported the blog archive? Can you please email your wordpress URL to support and more details on exactly what was exported? Also, make sure you follow the tutorial exactly as shown as see our trouble shooting article at:

http://www.ragesw.com/support/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/103/0/only-my-blog-titles-are-appearing-not-my-blog-posts-or-comments

Mark Says:
June 7th, 2014 at 5:51 am

You say you’re working on adding a blog to Everweb. Do you have a date you expect this to be released?

paul Says:
June 9th, 2014 at 11:03 pm

Not yet, but we’re hard at work on it and it is coming along.

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