How to merge blogs together

Maybe you will never, ever decide to merge the posts from one of your Wordpress blogs into another. But if you do, as I once did, you might find this list of instructions helpful. Terminology check: “merging” blog refers to the blog that’s going to have all its posts moved into another one, and the one that’s receiving those posts is called the “merged” blog.

• Backup AT LEAST your databases. Nothing about this should affect the files on your server, but it’s very important that you’re able to reload an old version of your database just in case something goes wrong. Then you can start over when you’ve figured out what went wrong.
• Compare the category and tag structure of your blogs. Before you merge anything, you want to make sure the categories and tags from the merging blog match the one they’re being merged into. Wordpress has several tools built in to help you with this (no plugins required!):
  • Click Posts, then Edit (on the merging blog). Use the filters to select the posts whose categories you want to change. You can now select as many of those posts as you want, then select “Edit” from the Bulk Actions drop down (top left). That will open an Ajax window. Click the categories you want those posts to appear in – they all will have to be identical.
  • Wordpress also has a “category to tag” converter on the Categories page – near the bottom. When you click that link, you find there are two buttons at the top: Categories to Tags and Tags to Categories. Using either of these, you can do just what they say: convert a category to a tag, or a tag to a category.
  • Give this some thought. There are several ways to structure the merged posts. Make sure you’ve come up with an easy navigation system, and then use these tools to fit your posts into it.
• Once you’ve done that, use Wordpress’ exporting feature (under Tools) in the merging blog. It’ll create a file on your hard drive.
• Go to the merged blog and use Import under the Tools menu. It may ask questions, like whether you want all the merging posts attributed to a certain author. Just answer the questions, and it’ll do the rest.
• Now look at the new site. The posts are in there. Does the menu make sense? Does anything need to be changed? Do you want to link to any of the new posts from old ones? Feature any of the new ones?
• It’s pretty important to redirect people from your old post locations to the new ones, both so they can find them and so the search engines won’t penalize you for dupe content. How you set up redirects depends what you’re trying to achieve. If the old posts were on another domain, you can redirect your entire domain. If it was a subfolder of the main domain, you may need to write several different redirects to get everything forwarding.
• If your blogs linked to one another and you want to correct the now inaccurate hyperlinks, use the Search and Replace plugin. It’s very powerful, and gives you lots of options to make sure you change the links exactly where you want to and never where you don’t.

1. Consolidating Categories
2. Backup Solutions for Serendipity and WordPress blogs
3. Technorati Tags and Folksonomies
4. Tagging, and what it does for you in Google
5. Lighter Admin Menus just got even better

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