WordPress Lost Categories on Import

I ran into problems when I was moving hosts from Dreamhost to Page.ly¹ (my vendor of choice).

I exported my content from wordpress (on dreamhost) using wordpress’ built in export feature.

I imported my content to WordPress (on page.ly) using wordpress’ built in import feature.

All my posts and pages and categories were there, but none of the categories were connected to the posts — All the posts were brought into the default category (in my case “Uncategorized” was the default category).

This is shitty because categories matter a great deal on this site, so I messed around for a while trying to figure out how to fix this.

One nice find was a WordPress Plugin called WordPress Reset — it resets your WP database to fresh installation defaults, i.e., deletes all posts, comments, categories, settings, etc. Helpful.

The Fix:

Ultimately I found out how to import all my posts with the proper category connections. It’s pretty simple: **instead of exporting through WordPress’ built in tool, export using the WordPress Advanced Export Plugin.

With this plugin you can export by category and get funky, but all you need to do is export the whole shebang with this plugin, then import that file to your new WP install and you’re ready to go.

WTF?

This is a shitty thing to have to do — use some plugin instead of the built in export/import functionality. Shouldn’t be broken, but it is. Life is cold and unfair. Get your warmth where you can.