After more than four years of inactivity on my personal blog (I’ve been busy blogging professionally in the meantime), I’ve decided to migrate my old blog to Octopress.

Several reasons for this. The first one is mostly that I don’t believe Dotclear has a future anymore. At the time I chose Dotclear over Wordpress, it was in very active development, going from 1.x to 2.x with regular release and a very active community: it was a promising software that could have fought side by side with wordpress. Morevoer, it was a french software.

However, Dotclear is probably to much of a carbon copy of wordpress: same technology (PHP), same admin architecture, … to make the difference. Wordpress is backed by a dedicated compagny, and Dotclear which is made as a hobby project just can’t catch up. As a consequence, there is no technical reason to use dotclear over wordpress anymore: the later has a much more active development pace, a wide ecosystem and a very active community… Dotclear has been completely forgotten: only its own community care about it. Tools such as Disqus don’t provide any integrated solution for dotclear, leaving users to hack the code of their theme if they wish to integrate that kind of service. Even tools that aims at providing migration utility to other blogging platform don’t list Dotclear as a source platform.

The second reason is that I find it completely overkill to run some PHP to serve a near-static content. My blog has not been update for 4 years, but every time someone reads a page, it goes through some PHP. PHP may be (have been) great for dynamic sites, but not for delivering content: it consumes resources and may contain security hole. The sole dynamic part of the site that is user-facing is the comment system… however nowadays services like Disqus, Google or Facebook can be integrated in your site for this in just a few lines of HTML/javascript (and by selling your soul to the devil): you may have an interactive site with only static pages.

So, its done, my site has been migrated to a new static platform and is hosted by github (which wasn’t mandatory but frees me from a bit of system administration). I couldn’t find any packaged tool to perform the migration so I wrote one small script by myself. If the script is of interest for you here is how to proceed:

• export the database and the media library of your blog from Dotclear maintenance page
• unpack the media library in the source/assets directory of Octopress
• run the Python script on the database export (which should be named python dotclear-octopress.py <date>-<blogname>-<backup>.txt (the scripts runs in Python and requires pip install phpserialize)
• the script should have generated a new directory that contains a series of .csv file and a subdirectory called _posts that contains the markdown pages for your old blog posts.
• copy the content of _posts to source/_posts of Octopress.

At this point, the result is not perfect (but I’m sure the script can be improved), you’ll still have to go through your posts and check that they were properly markdownified (Dotclear source text is in a Dotclear-specific wiki syntax, the script tries to do the conversion, but it is not 100% accurate and will miss some corner cases).

The script also dump a file rss.xml that contains the extended RSS format that can be used to import discussions on Disqus.