[wp-hackers] WordPress Export

[Eric Mann]

I've been in the throes of a large WordPress migration this past month.
 Seventeen individual WordPress sites are migrating to a single WP 3.0.1
network installation.  At the moment, several users have separate accounts
(logins) on each site - I'm moving them to a network to enable network-wide
login and better control over similar sites that are all running custom
child themes of K2 with similar set of plug-ins.  It's just easier to
maintain the network than the separate sites.

Unfortunately, my workflow is not the most efficient, but I can't think of a
better way to do it:


   1. Set up the new Site on the network
   2. Export posts, pages, and taxonomies from the existing site
   3. Import into the new Site
   4. Manually re-enter links
   5. Manually transfer reading, writing, permalink settings
   6. Activate plug-ins on the new Site that I was using on the old
   standalone installation
   7. Install/Activate any plug-ins that were missing
   8. Download the old theme via FTP
   9. Upload the theme to the new Site via FTP
   10. Export the wp_users table from the old site in phpMyAdmin
      - Delete any entries for users that already exist on the new Site
      - Run the SQL INSERT statement on the new Site's wp_X_users table
   11. From the network user management panel, use the Edit link to manually
   assign the new users to their roles for the new Site
   12. Set up the Site to use its proper domain with the MU Domain Mapping
   plug-in
   13. Point the domain at the appropriate folder on the server (with Media
   Temple, I just set a symlink for the folder)

Is there a faster/easier way to do this?  With a relatively empty site with
2-3 users this can be pretty easy.  More complex sites (lots of posts, 90+
users, etc) can take over an hour to transfer.  Frequently, some images will
break (not all of them convert from /wp-content/uploads/ to /files/ on
import) and I have to step through the broken posts myself.

What I would really like is a "clone site" button in Multisite which would
go out, retrieve the content, images, and *settings* from the old site and
automatically set up the new one.  Pulling in existing user accounts would
be awesome, too.  Sending out 100+ "please reset your password" messages is
a massive drawback when selling clients on moving to multisite, and right
now doing the SQL export/import is the only way I can think to transfer user
accounts and hashed passwords.

So, is there a better way?