Most post types (Pages, Events, Classes, etc) are too different from our theme to import automatically, and should be entered manually.
Posts, though, are a similar enough post type that importing/exporting will work. Here's how.
Export
- Log in to your current website.
- Go to Tools >> Export.
- Select Posts.
- If applicable, select the Category of posts you want to export.
- We recommend selecting Published posts only.
- Click "Download Export File."
- If you have many years of posts or lots of images, you could try limiting the date range and downloading 1-2 years at a time. You want a file size under 25MB.
Import
- Log in to the new Gameflow staging site.
- Go to Tools >> Import.
- Under WordPress, click Run Importer.
- Click Choose File, then select the file you exported from your current website.
- It will ask you about the authors of the posts. Whatever you choose will show up as the author of the post in the new site, so it depends on what you want to display. You have a few options:
- Import the authors, which will auto-create users for each post author.
- You can create a new username like Marketing Team and map them all to that. Choose this if you don't want users in your new site for the authors (for example, if you have a bunch of old articles published by people who don't work at your company anymore),
- Create new users to match the post authors, or map the post authors to current users of the site.
- Check "Download and import file attachments." WordPress will import categories & tags matched to the posts, and it will attempt to import images attached as well (sometimes the image import doesn't work, though. The importer tool is finicky.)
Proof
- Go to Posts >> Posts, find all the posts you imported today, and make sure they all have the right categories attached. (You can use the Bulk Edit tool; let us know if you need help.)
- Spot check a few posts to see if the images and users were imported as you wanted.
- You may have to add images or set custom authors if the import didn't import them.
- You're all done!