I can’t say I ever thought I’d write something along these lines, because in the five years or so I’ve been helping people blog, no one has ever asked me to move them from WordPress to another blogging platform. I’ve moved plenty to WordPress, but that’s pretty much where people tend to stay.
That all changed last week, though, when a client asked me to migrate her WordPress blog to TypePad. I set out to find an easy tool that would export into the format preferred by TypePad and Movable Type. I was pretty surprised to search and find nothing going in that direction—it seemed to only go the other way. I may have just been looking in the wrong places, though. I did find a guide to the process, but it detailed more database modifications than the average user would want to do.
Regardless of utility availability, my task still lay before me, so I wrote a quick template file to format the data for TypePad. There were some issues with the fancy quotes and such that WordPress adds, but it’s now at a point that seems reasonably stable and worked reliably for me (as always, your mileage may vary).
I truly doubt this is in any way original, but if it will be useful to you, please download the zipped WordPress-to-Movable Type exporter. (I know, it’s technically a theme and not a plugin, but it is much more utility-oriented than beauty-oriented.)
To use it, just place unzipped the “utility-export-to-mt” folder in your “themes” folder (under “wp-content” in your blog files). Then, in the WordPress admin panel, go to the Presentation tab and select the “Export for Movable Type/TypePad 1.0″ theme. View your front page (which will now look pretty much awful!) and save it. If you are given the option, save it as UTF-8. The file you’ve just saved will be the file you upload into Movable Type or TypePad.
If this doesn’t work for you, or if you have request or suggestions, feel free to leave a bug report.