Migrating content from Mango Blog to Mura CMS

When I replaced Mango Blog with Mura CMS, as the engine of this website (why?), I didn't want to loss all my content. Let me explain how I took care of this using Mango Blog and Mura CMS features, a ColdFusion script and some old school copy and paste.

Migrating posts

For the migration of the posts I used some build in features of Mango Blog and Mura CMS. Like every blog software Mango Blog provide an RSS feed and that is all Mura CMS needs to import your content.

By default Mango Blog's RSS feed only contains the last 15 posts, so change this by replacing <mango:posts count="15"> by <mango:posts> on line 25 in [Mango Blog root]/feeds/rss.cfm and now the RSS feed will contain all posts.

In Mura CMS, follow these steps to import an RSS feed:

  1. Create a Portal in the site manager, this is a page where we will located the new posts "below";
  2. Go to Content Collections and create a new Remote Feed, as the URL you use the RSS feed of your Mango Blog (http://www.myblog.com/feeds/rss.cfm);
  3. Choose "Import Location" and select the portal you created in step 1;
  4. Click the "Add" button at the bottom of the page to create the Content Collection;
  5. Next in the list of Remote feeds, click the "import" icon, this icon looks like a floppy disc;
  6. Now You'll see a list of all available posts for import;
  7. Uncheck any ones you don't want, click "Import" button at bottom of page.

Because you import from an RSS feed you could also do this from other blogging software as long as it has an RSS feed, witch most do.

Migrating comments

Migrating the comments was a little bit more work. I wrote a little ColdFusion script that reads the comments in the Mango Blog database and created them in the Mura CMS database. You can download the script here.

Be aware, I only compare the titles when looking for the post in Mura CMS, when you have multiple posts with the same title you might want to add the date to compare as well.

Migrating pages

Since I only had 4 pages to migrate (and one of them was a contact form that I had to rebuild in Mura CMS anyway) I just copied and pasted them. I know it isn't very sexy, but this was the fastest way because of the limited amount of content.