Robb. Knight.

I recently helped my friend Tim move his site from a Wordpress install to a much simpler Eleventy setup. The biggest hurdle was transforming the Wordpress exported data into Markdown files. Thankfully wordpress-export-to-markdown exists. This is a command line tool that takes a wordpress export, puts all the posts in markdown files, and downloads all the images contained in the posts.

I did make an adjustment to this script so I could add a permalink attribute to each post by editing the parser.js file:

frontmatter: {
    title: getPostTitle(post),
+   permalink: `${getPostSlug(post)}/index.html`,
    date: getPostDate(post),
    categories: getCategories(post),
    tags: getTags(post)
}

The image download will take a while but once it was done I had all the posts and all the images ready to pop into an Eleventy site.

To match Tim's existing site it needed support for markdown footnotes and image captions. As a side note here, footnotes do not export well from Wordpress via the CLI tool so I had to manually fix all of them which was not fun. Al Power had an article for both of these features which was handy. To add footnote support I followed the steps in this article which outlines how to include markdown-it-footnote for the markdown parsing and this article to add image captions.

All in all it went fairly smoothly - without wordpress-export-to-markdown I would have had to write my own parsing script which I'm very glad I didn't have to do.