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August 2, 2010 | View Comments

After a nice six-month exper­i­ment with Square­space, I’ve decided to switch back to Word­Press. Square­space was reli­able and easy to set up, but I found I missed some of the plu­g­ins avail­able on WP. Plus, the Square­space post edi­tor was a lit­tle flaky, and the iPhone app crashes every time I use it.

For some­one with basic needs, Square­space is prob­a­bly a great solu­tion, but it just isn’t a good fit for me.

So, I’m switch­ing back to Word­Press, which has proved to be a bit more dif­fi­cult than I thought. I haven’t found an easy way to export my last few years’ worth of posts with­out man­gling them, so I’ve decided to press on with the new WordPress-based site while I try to extract the archives behind the scenes.

Yes, I know this has turned into a super-geeky post, but I thought I’d give you guys an update and let you know that I haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth!

Update: I fig­ured out how to export Square­space entries to Word­Press. It’s hardly an ele­gant solu­tion, but it seemed to get my text over.

1. From the front page of my Square­space blog, I switched to “Struc­ture Edit­ing” mode, then clicked on the “con­fig­ure this page” above my most recent post.
2. A pop-up win­dow appears on the right-hand side. Under the “Con­fig­u­ra­tion” tab, I scrolled all the way down to the bot­tom to “Data Export”. As it explains, “Square­space can export your blog to Mov­able Type com­pat­i­ble for­mat if you’d like to move to another sys­tem.” I clicked on “Export Blog Data” and con­firmed the export.
3. From Word­Press, I went to “Import” under “Tools” and went through the import process as if I was migrat­ing from a Mov­able Type blog. I cre­ated a new user to help keep my imported posts orga­nized. All of my Square­space entries seemed to move over, except with­out my tags.

So, unless I feel like going though all of my old posts, the archive will remain un-tagged, which is kind of a bum­mer. Next, I need to fig­ure out how to down­load my Square­space stor­age folder and migrate the images over to Word­Press. How­ever, there doesn’t seem to be an obvi­ous way to do that.

Update 2: In the Square­space man­ual, there is no men­tion of a way to export the “Stor­age” folder, where all my pho­tos and post images live. Accord­ing to sev­eral forum posts, this kind of bulk down­load or export is impos­si­ble. How frus­trat­ing, espe­cially for a com­pany that sells itself as being super-easy to import and export posts between Word­Press. Looks like I’ll have to go image-by-image, down­load each file indi­vid­u­ally, then upload every­thing to my Word­Press site. What a pain.

I sent an email to Square­space to ask them if there’s a way to do it. Maybe I’m just miss­ing something.

Update 3: Just got it con­firmed by Squarespace.

Hi there,
There’s no set­ting to export all your file stor­age con­tent — images in gallery pages and files in file stor­age need to be down­loaded man­u­ally, sorry about this.

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By Gavin St. Ours Tags: Squarespace, WordPress