Migrating s9y to WordPress

It took me some time to dig into it but finally managed to migrate. Serendipity is a nice blog platform that served me well for 10 years. But I couldn’t find a theme that would suite my needs and be responsive. So I decided to move. Here are the steps I took:

  1. Download the WordPress version 4.1 from 2014 from https://wordpress.org/download/releases/. This might not be necessary but I did it just in case since the migration code I found was from 2012.
  2. Install WordPress.
  3. Head to the s9y-to-wp plugin page on github to check the instructions. I did not follow them by the word as they are written for an even older version of WordPress.
  4. In phpMyAdmin or in CLI run this SQL:
    TRUNCATE wp_posts;
    TRUNCATE `wp_postmeta`;
    TRUNCATE `wp_term_relationships`;
    TRUNCATE `wp_term_taxonomy`;
    TRUNCATE `wp_comments`;
    TRUNCATE `wp_commentmeta`;
    DELETE FROM wp_terms WHERE wp_terms.term_id!=1;
  5. I ssh-ed to my server to copy the plugin:

    $ cd /var/www/wp/wp-content/plugins
    $ mkdir serendipity
    $ cd serendipity
    $ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ShakataGaNai/s9y-to-wp/master/serendipity.php

  6. In WordPress Dashboard go to Plugins -> Installed plugins