Exporting Ghost to Wordpress - json

Question

I've been searching for a possibility to copy my Ghost Blog posts to Wordpress.
So far, I've managed to export all ghost data to a JSON file -- do you know any existing tool to convert it to something Wordpress can import?
If not, and I have to build something myself, would you recommend parsing the JSON to a WXR file or similar, or rather import into Wordpress' DB directly?
Thanks in advance!
K.

Answer 1

I migrated a Ghost blog to Wordpress by reading in the Ghost JSON export, massaging it a little and using wp_insert_post to import the posts.
This code should be placed in your theme's functions.php file - you can export your Ghost posts (GhostData.json) at http://example.com/ghost/debug/.
Note: example below doesn't import all data, but most key fields.
/**
* A function used to programmatically create a post in WordPress.
*
* http://tommcfarlin.com/programmatically-create-a-post-in-wordpress/
*
* #returns post ID if successful
* -1 if the post was never created
* -2 if a post with the same title exists
*/
function create_wp_post ($post_details) {
// Initialize the page ID to -1. This indicates no action has been taken.
$post_id = -1;
$post = get_page_by_title($post_details['title'], 'OBJECT', 'post');
// If the page title doesn't already exist, then insert the post
if (is_null($post)) {
// Set the post ID so that we know the post was created successfully
$post_id = wp_insert_post(
array(
'comment_status' => 'closed',
'ping_status' => 'closed',
'post_author' => $post_details['author'],
'post_content' => $post_details['content'],
'post_date' => $post_details['date'],
'post_date_gmt' => $post_details['date_gmt'],
'post_name' => $post_details['slug'],
'post_status' => $post_details['status'],
'post_title' => $post_details['title'],
'post_type' => 'post',
'tags_input' => $post_details['tags_input']
)
);
// Page title already exists, return error
} else {
$post_id = -2;
}
}
/**
* A function used to filter Ghost blog posts into Wordpress format.
*/
function filter_ghost_posts () {
$posts = json_decode(file_get_contents('GhostData.json'), true);
if ($posts) {
foreach ($posts['data']['posts'] as $post) {
$post_details = array(
'author' => $post['author_id'],
'date' => date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $post['published_at'] / 1000),
'date_gmt' => gmdate('Y-m-d H:i:s', $post['published_at'] / 1000),
'id' => $post['id'],
'content' => $post['html'],
'status' => $post['status'],
'slug' => $post['slug'],
'title' => $post['title']
);
// Status
// Fix discrepancy in naming between Ghost and Wordpress
if ($post_details['status'] === 'published') {
$post_details['status'] = 'publish';
}
// Tags
$post_tags_list = [];
foreach ($posts['data']['posts_tags'] as $post_tags) {
if ($post['id'] === $post_tags['post_id']) {
$post_tags_id = $post_tags['tag_id'];
array_push($post_tags_list, $posts['data']['tags'][$post_tags_id]['name']);
}
}
if (count($post_tags_list) > 0) {
$post_details['tags_input'] = implode(',', $post_tags_list);
}
$post_id = create_wp_post($post_details);
if ($post_id == -1 || $post_id == -2) {
// Error handling here
}
}
}
}
add_filter('after_setup_theme', 'filter_ghost_posts');

Answer 2

My recommendation would be to use Google Refine to import the JSON, and export a CSV, then use WP Ultimate CSV Importer Plugin to import it into your WordPress site. Hope this helps.

Answer 3

The question is quite old, but as of 2017 I still wasn't able to find a solution for Ghost > WP posts migration. What I did is:
Export JSON data, as described here - https://help.ghost.org/hc/en-us/articles/224112927-Import-Export-Data
Change a few JSON fields, like title, markdown... to post_title and post_content etc. (list of WP post fields is here - https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Post), and remove a few unneeded ones, like update_at or amp. What I left with was:
ID
post_title
post_name
post_content
post_status
meta_title
meta_description
post_author
post_date
Remove other JSON fields/structure, so there's only "posts": []
Use JSON to CSV converter, like this one - https://konklone.io/json/ and download CSV result file.
Now, when you have a CSV file, install WordPress CSV Importer plugin - https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-ultimate-csv-importer/ (or similar)
Upload CSV file to the importer, check if fields are selected correctly.
Enjoy the imported posts on your WP dashboard ;)
Notice:
Ghost does not enable image exporting with other data (as of 31/01/2017).
You may wish to change "post_status" from "publish" to "pending", so posts are not published right away, before you edit them properly ;)

Answer 4

In case anyone is looking for this in future:
You could use the ghost-to-wp npm package. This will convert the JSON file you get as an export from Ghost into a WordPress-ready WXR file that can be directly imported into WordPress:
$ npm i -g ghost-to-wp
$ ghost-to-wp yourghostexport.json
As noted by #lomza there is still no way to nicely export images as part of the Ghost file so you will have to migrate images manually.
Disclosure: I am the author of ghost-to-wp.

Answer 5

I tried various importers and the best solution ended up just importing directly from RSS URL like https://myghostblog.com/rss/ with import-xml-feed plugin.
P.S. Keep pagination in mind. Your RSS link might show only first page of posts by default, and so for importing other pages you'll have to manually add /2/ /3/ to the URL and importing each separately. (At least, that's what I needed to do.)