Glen Smith

I’ve been using Wordpress for some client integration jobs recently and have really fallen in love with the easy of use and extensive plugins that Wordpress brings to the content management space.

So I’ve taken the bold move of moving all my data out of Gravl, my long-dead Grails based blogging system, and onto Wordpress. The only problem was getting the data out!

First though: write a little user script and get Grails to run it. The only caveat is that I’ve mucked around with Grails scripting system before, but often ended up fighting a lot harder than I needed to make all the right events have fired to ensure everything was sparked up.

Enter Ted Nalied’s little “grails run-script“ command! It’s even bundled with Grails 1.3.6+, so there’s no excuse to not love it completely! (I even grabbed the source and dropped it into my Grails 1.2.3 app so I didn’t have to worry about upgrading).

This little bad boy lets you write user scripts that are run once the entire Grails system is up and running (think: copy and paste from “grails console” and save yourself a script you can use over and over).

grails run-script exportcsv.groovy

And say goodbye to nasty Gant hacks to get all the dependencies right! The contents of exportcsv.groovy are executed with a full Grails stack in play, so just go ahead and call stuff:

List be = BlogEntry.findAllWhere(status: "published")
be.each { entry ->
    List line = []
    line << entry.title
    line << entry.body
    line << (entry.tags*.name).join(",") // normal GORM relationships are fine
    line << entry.title.encodeAsNiceTitle() // codecs work too!
    // tons of other "go crazy" export code here
}

Add a little opencsv to the mix, and install the Wordpress CSV import plugin, and you have yourself 281 posts, and 781 comments all nicely imported.

Fantastic stuff. I’m going to make good use of this on my next project following Ted’s little idea of prototyping in Grails Console, then saving away the script for later.

Great work Ted! I’m off to find some Wordpress templates to make this blog look nice!