Movable Type Import Format


NAME

mtimport - Movable Type Import Format


SYNOPSIS

This document describes the format required by the Movable Type import mechanism, which can be used to import entries and comments from other content management systems.


DESCRIPTION

The basic import format is a list of entries, separated by the string --------\n (that is eight - characters, followed by a carriage return). Each entry can be broken into two main sections; these sections are separated by the string -----\n (that is five - characters, followed by a carriage return).

If you have HTML in the data that you are importing, it should not be encoded into HTML entities; the data that is in your import file is imported verbatim into the Movable Type database. Thus, your data should look exactly as it would were you to type it into the form when creating a new entry.

See EXAMPLE, below, for an example of a small import file.

Metadata

Each piece of metadata is formatted as KEY: VALUE, and one piece of metadata is separated from the next by a carriage return. The order of the metadata pieces is not important.

For example:

AUTHOR: Foo Bar
TITLE: A dummy title
DATE: 01/31/2002 03:31:05 PM
CATEGORY: News

Multi-line fields

Multi-line fields are separated by -----\n (that is five - characters, followed by a carriage return). Each multi-line field is started by the key denoting the type of field, followed by a carriage return, followed by the actual body of the field.

For example:

BODY:
This is the body.
-----
EXTENDED BODY:
Here is some more text.
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Foo
DATE: 01/31/2002 15:47:06
This is
the body of this comment.
-----
PING:
TITLE: Foo Bar
URL: http://www.foo.com/baz/archives/000015.html
DATE: 08/05/2002 04:05:23 PM
This is
the excerpt of the ping.
-----


EXAMPLE

TITLE: A dummy title
AUTHOR: Foo Bar
DATE: 01/31/2002 03:31:05 PM
PRIMARY CATEGORY: Media
CATEGORY: News
-----
BODY:
This is the body.
-----
EXTENDED BODY:
Here is some more text.
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Foo
DATE: 01/31/2002 15:47:06
This is
the body of this comment.
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Bar
DATE: 02/01/2002 04:02:07 AM
IP: 205.66.1.32
EMAIL: me@bar.com
This is the body of
another comment. It goes
up to here.
-----
PING:
TITLE: My Entry
URL: http://www.foo.com/old/2002/08/
IP: 206.22.1.53
BLOG NAME: My Weblog
DATE: 08/05/2002 16:09:12
This is the start of my
entry, and here it...
-----
--------
TITLE: Here is a new entry
AUTHOR: Baz Quux
DATE: 01/31/2002 03:31:05
CATEGORY: Politics
-----
BODY:
This is the body of the second entry. It can
consist of multiple lines.
-----
EXCERPT:
See, this entry does not have an extended piece; but
it does have an excerpt. It is special.
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Quux
URL: http://www.quux.com/
DATE: 01/31/2002 04:23:01 PM
Here is the first comment on this entry.
-----
--------

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