For anyone importing a Wordpress blog to Shopify using the Wordpress Importer by Shopify app I wanted to share a few issues I ran into and potential work arounds.
Caution: Make sure you backup your Wordpress database before attempting any of this, or even better clone your entire Wordpress site onto a temporary domain name and import from there instead of importing directly from a production Wordpress installation.
MISSING IMAGES
The app seems to skip over images in your Wordpress posts that use relative URLs. For example, this image in a post would NOT be imported:
<img src="/wp-content/uploads/whatever.jpg" />If you update all your images to use absolute URLs they will be imported to Shopify as assets as expected:
<img src="http://my-wordpress-site.com/wp-content/uploads/whatever.jpg" />You can do this quickly using the WP-CLI and running a search-replace on your database to update the images. Make sure you backup your Wordpress database,
MISSING POST AUTHORS
In Shopify if you end up with blog posts where the author is set to a number like "10" or "64" this is because the Shopify app imports the literal contents of the "post_author" field from your "wp_posts" table in Wordpress. This field is an integer that references another table in your Wordpress installation. To fix, I altered my Wordpress wp_posts table and changed the post_author field from a BIGINT(20) to VARCHAR(255), then updated the values with authors names and ran the Shopify import again. Caution: THIS WILL BREAK YOUR WORDPRESS SITE, make sure you have proper backups etc.
Once you have changed the post_author field to a string you can update all the authors with a MySQL query similiar to the following:
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_author=(SELECT display_name FROM wp_users WHERE wp_users.ID = wp_posts.post_author);Heads up: Users are matched in Shopify based on their full name, so you probably want to create Shopify users first with names matching your Wordpress users before importing.
INCORRECT POST DATES
This app seems to use the "modified" post date from Wordpress as the post date when importing into Shopify. If, like me, you just made a bunch of hacks to your Wordpress database it means you will likely be importing all your posts with today's date. To fix update your wp_posts table and copy the values from the post_date field to the post_modified field(s):
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_modified=post_date, post_modified_gmt=post_date, post_date_gmt=post_date;Hopefully there will be some updates for these issues in the future, but otherwise this app has saved us a ton of time importing multiple Wordpress blogs to Shopify.
Again, please make sure you know what you're doing before altering your Wordpress database directly, and I would never recommend attempting these hacks on a live / production Wordpress installation, but I wanted to share this for anyone who might run into the same issues in the future.