Ok now in my previous post I had written about all the initial steps of building my site. In this post I shall write more about what I did to export all my posts and comments from blogger to wordpress and how I went about customising the site to suit my requirements.

Wordpress comes with a Import from blogger script that does the importing work, but before I could run that I needed to do various things, which are well documented with pictures here. Also check out this for the steps (without pictures) or this if you’re importing from other than Blogger.

It wasn’t all a walk in the park. The process didnt work for me immediately. The script had some problems as the database had some changes in Wordpress 2.0. I did some googling and read through comments at various blogs and finally found the changes that I needed to make to ensure an error free import. I modified the script and went through the various steps for the 3rd time and this time all posts and comments were succesfully imported from Blogger to WordPress, but unfortunately the comment count didn’t increase. All posts said “O Comments”, even though they had comments!

When I posted a test comment the comment count for that post added up fine and displayed the correct number. To get all the posts’ comments to show the correct number, I manually went through every post with a comment and clicked Edit and then Save for any one comment, once I did this the comment count displayed the proper count. I also had to edit many of the posts and update the links and images with their new locations. Once I finished this my blog was up and running proper on my new host.

The final and proper Import from Blogger script that worked for me can be downloaded here. [Download the text file and rename it to .php and upload to your wp-admin folder]

Ok now I had installed Wordpress on my root (I forgot to mention this in my previous post), so my blog was being published to http://sabarish.net, but I wanted that to be my home page address and my blog address to be http://sabarish.net/blog. I created a new page called Home with some static content to be displayed as my home page. I then installed a plugin called Filosofo Home-Page Control which let me control which page is displayed as the home page and which as the blog page. Hat tip: Nandu anna for mailing me that plugin. After this, I had to modify the header.php file of the theme to add a link to point to the Home page and had to modify the blog url to include “/blog”.

I wanted to change the default Kubric theme to something else and found and installed the sequel to Kubric, called K2, which comes with its own custom styles and also supports many plugins. Click here for a list of essential resources for K2.

Next, I wanted a page to display my photo galleries from flickr. For this I downloaded and activated another plugin called FAlbum. Installation instructions can be found here or here for a K2 specific installation.

Now my site was shaping up quite nicely. I had my static Home page, the Blog page and the Photos page. I added another static Contact page and also enabled archives in the K2 theme options.

I wanted a nice archive solution for my archived posts and found the Extended Live Archives plugin.

Finally I installed and played around with various extra plugins and modified the theme, including the sidebars, header and footer to add extra content like my counter, 43things, google ads, etc.

That’s it. My site was complete, up and ready.

I will have one more post (or maybe even a page), in which I shall list all the plugins that I have used and will constantly update that in the future as and when I use more plugins.