After 5 years, starting from the humble BlogX that ChrisAn wrote to Clemens and then ScottH's dasBlog, I finally moved over to BlogEngine.NET today. My main reasons for moving over included a brand new codebase, more features, better themes and frequent releases.
The other platforms that I had in mind were WordPress and Grafitti CMS, I gave up on WordPress due to my hoster being on Windows and didn't want to go through the trouble of figuring out how to get url rewrites for PHP working on IIS under my hoster's limitations.
Grafitti would have been my choice but it choked when I tried to import my blog posts. I opened a ticket with Telligent Systems and the really good guys mailed me today that the fix would be out in the next release this Friday. But in the end I thought it best to go with an open source platform and one that focused solely on blogging.
Okay now to the gory details of migrating my blog over. Which actually took a total of less than 10 minutes to setup on my machine and less than 30 minutes to upload everything to my hoster.
This is what I did to get my posts over to BlogEngine.NET
1. Setup BlogEngine locally on my machine. This just involved unzipping the file and pointing IIS to the folder.
2. Exported dasBlog to BlogML
The next version of dasBlog is scheduled to include this tool out of the box but right now you'll need to download the zip that Paul Van Brenk has made available. You'll need to run the code from Visual Studio and it exports all your posts into the handy BlogML format (If anyone want's this in a nice UI let me know and I can upload it). Edit: I've released this now, see http://merill.net/post/2008/03/DasBlog-to-BlogML-Converter.aspx
3. Import BlogML into BlogEngine.NET
BlogEngine starts up a fancy ClickOnce app when you click the Import button, just feed it the BlogML file and presto all your posts and comments are migrated over.
I went with the Files and Images Moved Manually option which meant that I didn't have to mess around with moving any of the images or changing the paths.
4. Upload content
I simply deleted all the folders on my host server except for the ones that had the images and uploaded files which would usually be the content folder. Even here you could all the xml files that hold the posts.
Next I uploaded the whole BlogEngine folder that I had locally and remember to get your hosting provider to allow write permission on the App_Data folder.
That's all!
5. Configure settings
Obviously you'll want to play around in the control panel of the new blog and do things like put in your Google Analytics and other tracking script (which you had to edit by hand manually), redirect to the feedburner url so that your readers get your messages.
There are some disadvantages though like the incoming links being broken but since I don't have anything noteworthy that people link to this isn't going to be a problem for me.
Does the BlogML export preserve your URLs? I have a lot of trackbacks to my blog, and I want to make sure that when I move to BlogEngine.NET the URLs remain the same for my existing posts. Thanks!
The Url’s don’t have anything to do with BlogML it simply a format for storing your posts.
BlogEngine.NET on the other hand can be configured to rewrite the urls to the format it was in your old blog (with certain limitations though).
If your hosting on IIS 7 then rewriting urls is going to be no problem.
I love a good success story.
Merrill,
Would it possible for you to upload the UI you mentioned for the BlogML importer/exporter?
@Carlos, You can find it at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/DasBlogML
Unfortunately Steve to get the exact same dasblog urls you might need to get the dasBlog source for re-writing and plug that in as a module so that the old urls keep working.
My website is working with php and mysql.
Como migraria de wordpress mu a BlogEngineNET?
thx for your answers!
Thanks for letting me know!
Could someone explain how BlogML import is supposed to work (or direct me to a link that will explain this)? I understand how to export a BlogML.xml file from BlogEngine. That makes sense. But something keeps going wrong with the import.
When I click import, I don’t get the ClickOnce application I can feed the xml, I’m told to download the blog.importer.application. So I download the application. I run the application. The application attempts to verify application requirements. Then it fails and gives a message: "Cannot download the application. The application is missing required files. Contact application vendor for assistance." What is going wrong? I feel like I’m missing some important piece of information…
I’ve taken a look through the help forums but it seems like I’m the only person to encounter this specific problem ? Thanks for any help or assistance.
Hi Merill,
When I originally commented I clicked the "Notify me when new comments are added" checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get four emails with the same comment.
Is there any way you can remove me from that service?
Thanks!
Hi,
I use both: dasBlog and BlogEngine.NET – like em both, but both have their bugs. Nevertheless: BlogEngine has a woderful theming that just rocks!
Great post.. Thanks
I have posted about it on the BlogEngine Forums
http://www.blogengineforum.net
[...] Yet another migration post, feels like just yesterday I migrated from dasBlog to BlogEngine.NET. [...]
Same here! great engine.. have customized it too http://www.psychosnail.com/blog, for the boat calculator site.
Easy to customize and integrate if you know ASP.NET.
Hi again Merill,
With dasblog seemingly on it’s last legs I’m revisiting moving to BlogEngine.NET and to that end I’ve written a provider that reads/writes dasblog posts and comments. Details are here:
http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/dasBlogProviderForUseWithBlogEngineNET.aspx
I thought comment again as we had a few exchanges on the subject and I felt this was worth mentioning as your post helped me when I first started looking into switching.
Hope all is well.
I feel blogengine is better than word press.
Blogengine is the best way to blog! Better than any other site I've ever seen
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Oh wow seems that Blogengine is getting popular , I might consider it
thanks good
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Oh wow seems that Blogengine is getting popular
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Thanks, this step through saved me ages
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Excellent Blog! I really admire your thinking and the way you have put these information in this post. Thanks for sharing an informative post.
Same here! great engine and easy to customized. we run wordpress and BlogEngine.NET but on our blogs to compare which application is better.
great
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when i keep searching all over the web what blogging platform that easy to crawl and index by search engine i found blogengine it really the best blogging platform i Iver used.
Thanks for the heads up. I had the same thing happen to me. Thanks for the step by step process of switching from dasblog Merill!
thanks for that post!
BlogEngine.NET is great!
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blogging platform powered by blogengine is really interesting. i am planning if i will migrate to blogengin but i don't know how to used.
Maybe I should try BlogEngine…
hmmm blogengine really good for blogging platform? but how about wordpress.
Nice, blogengine is on the rise!
I’ve been following your blog for a week now and i should say i am starting to like your post. and now how do i subscribe to your blog?
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