I’ve had to merge a couple of WordPress blogs before – even merged Blogger into WordPress a couple of times. One of the sticky issues about importing is if you already have two established blogs. How do you merge things and keep things straight? One way is to import the posts from the old blog into one specific category in the new blog.
WordPress by default allows you to select which authors to assign the imports but not which category to import the content to. The export file actually contains the category information each post belongs to. Since we know that information is in the exported file, why not get the file right to begin with?
You could edit the exported file but that’s kinda doing things the hard way especially if you have lots of posts to import. The easier way is while on the old blog, move all the posts into a special category – this category may have to be created and should be the same as the one you want in your new blog. For example, if you want the old blog posts to be imported to a category called ‘travel log’, create this category in your old blog, move all posts in there.
The built in bulk edit option in WordPress will be handy for this. I did find this has it’s quirks. So if that doesn’t work too well for you, you might want to try a plugin like Bulk Move to help you achieve that.
After you’ve moved all posts into the category you want, then generate the WordPress export file. When you import into your new blog the posts should appear in one category.
Image courtesy of Lars Sundström