universal-importer

PoC for a universal import mechanism for WP.

This is very much Work In Progress. The code is in flux and not in its final form.

What is this?

This is a plugin intended to explore the idea of importing any web site into a fresh WordPress install. In other words, an "anything-to-WordPress" importer; or a site cloner.

In order to focus the Proof of Concept on useful cases, I have aimed initially at a "WordPress-to-WordPress" scenario. It seems that this is a common use case: a user has lost admin access to an old WordPress site, and wants to create a new site that copies most of the pages and content from the old one.

How does it work?

The plugin includes:

• A simple web crawler that follows sitemap.xml files.
• A page parser that decomposes HTML into its main components like page content, navigation, metadata.
• A block converter, that converts rendered HTML into Gutenberg blocks.

Given a web site to import from, the plugin will crawl the site, and attempt to reproduce all of its posts and pages.

How do I test it?

In its current state I recomment only running this plugin in wp-now for safety

Requirements:

• npm
• php 8.1 with composer

To install php 8.1 on Macos:

brew install [email protected]

Usage:

npm install
composer install
npm run wp-now-import

This should run a fresh empty WP site in wp-now and open a browser window to http://localhost:8881/wp-admin/admin.php?import=universal-importer

(Note: there may be a wp-now bug preventing it from opening the landing page automatically)

If not, follow that link or open your wp-now site and visit wp-admin / Tools / Import / Universal Importer

Enter the URL of a WordPress web site to import and click the button.

Unit tests:

npm run test

Known issues

• Only some Gutenberg blocks are handled correctly
• Only some post types are handled correctly
• Custom post types are imported but not registered, so aren't visible (and query loop blocks fail even though they correctly use the right post_type)
• Permalink scheme isn't matched correctly
• Links and image/asset URLs are not yet rewritten to point to the new site
• Images and other attachments are not yet imported
• Navigation and other template-parts are not yet imported (but could be!)
• Can't run in Playground because CORS prevents crawling an external web site (could be fixed with a proxy)