I’ve recently setup a wordpress blog to use when we’re on holiday to post pictures and let people know how we’re getting on. I had an existing hosted blog up at shawandtashinjapan.wordpress.com which I wanted to import to my new self hosted blog, but ran into a whole world of pain while trying to run the built in importer.

I ran an export from the wordpress.org hosted blog which gave me an xml file which contained wordpresses own variant of rss. I then selected import from my new wordpress’s tools menu and gave it the xml file- all went well but when i asked it to download the attachments it all started to go to shit!

There were two main issues which i had to fix- the first was wordpress goes mental when it hits a 302 redirect when trying to grab an image, but there is a fix available for the download function in wordpress;

From : http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/downloading-images-for-import?replies=4

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< //ini_set("display_errors", true);
---
>
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< $response = wp_remote_request($url, $options);
< $headers = wp_remote_retrieve_headers($response);
<
< $cd = (string)$response['response']['code'];
<
< if ($cd == '301') {
< $response = wp_remote_request($headers['location'], $options);
< $headers = wp_remote_retrieve_headers($response);
< }
---
> $response = wp_remote_request($url, $options);
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< //$headers = wp_remote_retrieve_headers( $response );
---
> $headers = wp_remote_retrieve_headers( $response );
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<

Then i’m hit with timeouts coming from the FastCGI module- I’m running PHP 5.2 under IIS7 on Windows 2008 Web Edition- the error I was now getting when trying to run the import was;

The FastCGI process exceeded configured activity timeout

I found the fix for this one here: http://forums.iis.net/t/1076662.aspx. It was down to the FastCGI module timeout being hit, so it was just a matter of increasing that from the command line i executed;

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config -section:system.webServer/fastCgi /[fullPath='C:\php5\php-cgi.exe'].activityTimeout:600

In the end, I STILL didn’t get all the images over as some of them were quite large and the wordpress file server timed out while the script was trying to grab them, but i thought i would post this none the less, to save anyone else having to experience the evening i just had.

ergh…