Serendipity to WordPress Migration Toolkit

I’m a big fans of Serendipity Weblog System. I used Serendipity for almost all of my website. I have no problem with serendipity and it looks like more secure than another blog system, WordPress as an example. I know, WordPress seems to be less secure because WordPress have more user and more popular than Serendipity.

One main feature that Serendipity could not fit with all of my requirement is about themes or template. WordPress have a great themes than Serendipity has and it’s an advantage for WordPress user. After reviewing some Serendipity nice themes (that almost all of them have been applied on my blog), I decided to migrate my personal website on http://v2.vavai.net into WordPress and let another primary website (in Indonesian) without change.

The main reason is about Themes. I want to rebuild my website with Magazine Style and I found a nice magazine style, Arthemia2 that was created by Michael Jubel Hutagalung. He is a great web designer and I think Arthemia is one of a coolest WordPress magazine style themes.

Another problem came up : How to import and migrate Serendipity post and article, and category, and comment into WordPress ? Serendipity is not supported blog engine which can be imported into WordPress by default. I must take another option to migrate the existing blog content or let it loss and build from scratch. Although vavai.net have only about 40 post and some comment, I most likely to take another choice to migrate and keep them on new blog with WordPress.

Luckily, after various search on Google, I found a better choice. Mike Tyson (Sorry, just kidding. His name is Michael Tyson) has build a useful plugin named “Serendipity (s9y) importer for WordPress”. I found another plugin but I choose his plugin because he said,

“In the process of merging this site from Serendipity over to WordPress, I came across an importer which lets me migrate the data across. Unfortunately it was a bit buggy, not properly assigning categories and timing out when processing the post data.I made some improvements, and here’s the new version”

I got successfully exporting my old post, comment, categories and user from Serendipity into WordPress with the following step :

1. Create wordpress blog within same server (or sub domain) where your current Serendipity weblog hosted
2. Download the plugin (I save a copy as backup here and here) from Michael blog.
3. Extract the plugin
4. Copy serendipity.php into your WordPress folder, in wp-admin/import folder
5. Login to your new WordPress administration panel
6. Go to Manage | Import
7. Choose Serendipity and follow the wizard
8. Serendipity will be exported to WordPress, started with Categories, user, post and then comment
9. Export WordPress entry (post, comment, categories, page, etc) for another purpose, e.g. : for exporting into another WordPress blog.

Happy migrate !