Export WordPress to Hugo preserving comment threads

Yet another WordPress-to-Hugo export tool, but one which serves comment threads statically using Hugo, instead of relying on disqus or other external comment software.

Written from scratch in Go.

Using

Download, clone etc. and cd into the directory created.

% go test
% go build
% ./migrate-wp -h
% mkdir exported
% ./migrate-wp -outdir exported -xmlfile myWPexport.xml

How?

WordPress XML exports include a flat list of comments for each page. Each comment has an ID, and a ParentID. A ParentID of 0 indicates the comment hangs directly from the post/page. A ParentID pointing to another comment's ID is a response to that comment. Comment threads of arbitrary depth can be built with the ParentID linkage.

This tool will build a tree data structure with the comment threads, and write them into an HTML file, using unordered lists to build display hierarchies. This HTML file can then be embedded into the page content.

A typical page with comments will be represented like so:

post/my-post/
  index.md
  comments.html

This tool takes care of generating the directories and the two files within them.

Then, an appropriate Hugo layout can combine the contents:

<main>
  …
	{{ .Content }}
  <hr/>
  {{ with .Resources.GetMatch "comments.html" }}
      {{ .Content | safeHTML }}
  {{ end }}
</main>

Please refer to hugo documentation.

I've written a blog post to expand on the internals. I've found that comment threading makes a good showcase for Computer Science fundamentals.

Why?

In March 2022 I had a project to move a blog away from Wordpress, into a format that could be preserved in a thumb drive, read from the file-system, or served easily as a static site, locally or on an public site.

My tool of choice to generate static sites is hugo.

The better way to migrate a site from WordPress is to get into the site's WP administration panel, and use the Export options. This can produce:

• A full dump of the text of the site, into one or more XML files. This includes posts, pages, and the reader comments inside them.
• A full dump of the media library that was hosted in the site, which could include any images, .docx, PDF or other media that were saved and served from the site.

The XML files are unwieldy, and it is convenient to convert the content in them into Markdown files with a metadata section, to be used with some static site generator.

There are quite a few tools to help with this, but they are all limited, just good enough for the particular needs of their creators. None of them handled my particular needs:

1. The pages should be generated with the comments
2. The comments should be threaded
3. Any media files stored with the original site should be served locally from the statically generated version

Those existing tools that didn't disregard comments, gathered them to be served by https://disqus.com or other solutions, and left to them comment threading and display.

I wanted the comments frozen, closed, threaded, and served statically.

I have taken inspiration from two main tools:

• wordpress-export-to-markdown (javascript)
• wordpressxml2jekyll.rb (ruby)

The first one is very usable and complete, but does not handle comments. The second does handle comments, but puts them in a disqus-format YAML file, and delegates.

Since I was going to have to do quite a bit of coding, I decided to build from scratch using Go.