WordPress eXtended RSS to Static Site Generator Conversion

Overview

Python3 program to convert WordPress XML Export (WPXR) format files to Hugo Markdown files (with YAML metadata).

The latest version can be downloaded from https://github.com/danielfdickinson/wpxr-to-static.

This program is called wpxr-to-static because it is hoped (but not tested) that one could convert to other static generation systems simply by modifying the data models in the configuration files.

Acknowledgements

Inspired by “ExitWP for Hugo” by Arjan Wooning, which was a port of Thomas Frössman’s ExitWP tool (for Jekyll). wpxr-to-static is not a port of “ExitWP for Hugo”, but a completely new program. However, “ExitWP for Hugo” served as an excellent educational guide and testbed for understanding the ElementTree (Python standard library module used to parse the WPXR file) result of parsing the WPXR file as well as the internal tree structure created by parsing the ‘config.yaml’ file.

Dependencies

  • Python 3.8 or 3.9 (lower Python 3.x may work but are untested).
  • html5lib
  • markdownify
  • PyYAML
  • toml
  • urllib3

Using

“Install”

Obtain the Program: Option 1 (Archive)

Download a ZIP file containing the Python script from Github or download a .tar.gz file containing the Python script from Github

Obtain the Program: Option 2 (Git clone)

Clone the source from WPXR by Daniel F. Dickinson on Github

git clone https://github.com/danielfdickinson/wpxr-to-static.git

Obtain the Dependencies

In the directory resulting from extracting the .zip or the .tar.gz, or from cloning, issue:

pip install --user -r requirements.txt

Configure

Copy config.yaml from the extracted .zip or .tar.gz, or cloned directory, to a convenient location.

If you need to change the ‘data model’ you can also copy hugo_data_model.yaml to a location of your choice (not necessarily the same as config.yaml)

As the comments in config.yaml indicate, the defaults are present in the config.yaml as commented out entries. One only needs to uncomment lines if one needs to change from the default.

Some Configuration Settings of Particular Interest

data_models: A configuration file defining the mapping of the WPXR XML tags and contents to an intermediate form used to create a combination of YAML frontmatter and Markdown files for each post or page, and a config.toml for the site.

wpxr_file: Sets the location and name of the source WPXR (WordPress Xml) file.

build_dir: Where output is stored (aka target dir). If relative, is relative to the current working directly when you execute wpxr-to-static.

download_content_images: Whether to downloads images from the WordPress site into the target directory.

image_origin_local_path: If set, wpxr-to-static will first look here for an image file and only download the image if is not already present. Downloads are placed in this path.

item_type_filter: A YAML list of item types (as defined later) to exclude from output.

rename_files: A YAML map of target-field-name: original-field-name pairs

fields_value_replace: A YAML map of maps that lists fields with maps of regexp-to-replace: regexp-substitution pairs.

Data Model Definition

TBD

Execute

NB: A configuration file and data model in the location specified in the config file are required.

Option 1: config.yaml in Current Directory

Linux:

/path/to/wpxr-to-static.py

Windows:

C:\path\to\wpxr-to-static.py

NB Instead of config.yaml one can also use config.toml.

Option 2: config.yaml in another location

Linux:

/path/to/wpxr-to-static.py /another/path/to/config.yaml

Windows:

C:\path\to\wxpr-to-static.py C:\another\path\to\config.yaml

NB: You can substitute any name.yaml or name.toml for config.yaml.

Extras

yaml2toml.py is a very simple YAML to TOML converter.

License

wpxr-to-static - WordPress eXtended RSS to Static Site Generator Conversion

Copyright 2021 Daniel F. Dickinson

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.