I've been busy at work so fell a bit behind with Django. Last night I worked on a WordPress importer, so that I could migrate posts from my current blog(s) into the Django-powered blog that I'm coding. I'm using BeautifulSoup to parse the WordPress export file and insert them as Django objects.

Since I was running the script repeatedly, I had to figure out how to easily run it from the command line, without having to run it from inside manage.py shell. After some searching, I found that what I needed to do was set an environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_FILE to point to my settings file. After that, the importer script could be run repeatedly.

Also made a few tweaks to my dev copy:

• Modified URL mapping to follow the permalinks of the old blog (so that people linking to me don't suddenly have broken links)
• Added a tag cloud (Still using django-tagging)
• Added markdown support to the admin maintenance screen. I used to think I would need to code my own form for posting, but I think I can live with just using the admin-provided one (initially at least)

I plan to migrate my main blog over once I take my Christmas break (hopefully 2nd week of December)

Stuff to do:

• Use clean, non-hardcoded urls (url template tag and reverse())
• Customize the admin screen for posting
• Clean up the layout and templates