Ghost WordPress Plugin wrongly imports Visual Composer code

Developer help
1

Hello,

A lot of legacy websites use Visual Compositor Plugin on Wordpress Download Visual Composer for WordPress | Free Website Builder. The WordPress to Ghost export plugin (for WordPress) does not fully convert the code to regular html.

For instance, A small snippet of following:


<div class="wpb_column vc_column_container vc_col-sm-12">
    <div class="vc_column-inner">
        <div class="wpb_wrapper">
            CONTENT
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

Turns into


[vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” text_align=”left” box_shadow_on_row=”no”]
	[vc_column] 
CONTENT
    [/vc_column]
[/vc_row]

  • Is there a way to rightly remove all the Visual composer code? (without removing the content?)

  • Is there a WordPress Plugin setting which needs to be changed while importing content?

  • What version of Ghost are you using?
    Wordpress Plugin for Ghost ~ Latest version * 1.0.1

  • What’s your URL? This is the easiest way for others to debug your issue

  • What version of Ghost are you using?
    2.31.1

  • What configuration?
    SQL Lite , Linux, Nginx, Ghost-CLI version: 1.7.3

  • What browser?
    All

  • What errors or information do you see in the console?
    None

  • What steps could someone else take to reproduce the issue you’re having?

  1. Import the content of Wordpress which uses Visual compositor Download Visual Composer for WordPress | Free Website Builder
  2. Once Downloaded, Import the content (JSON) file in Labs section
  3. All the content downloaded would have some additional text like this

Production Case:
I am working on a large client website (can’t share the link, since I have signed an NDA); and the only thing stopping us from switching over to Ghost is that We have close to 1000 blogposts and a lot of content has visual composer code. Editing each one of them individually and removing/editing code over a short span of time isn’t feasible from my client’s end.

Thanks,
Prashant

2

Hi there @prashantsani. The WordPress Ghost export plugin is designed to export “typical” WordPress content. While Visual Composer may be a commonly used plugin, the export plugin can’t cater to all WordPress setups as there is far too much variation between each WordPress site.

A possible solution is to use this plugin Shortcode Cleaner Lite – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org. This plugin is designed to remove any shortcodes that aren’t being used on the site. You could install this and do the following:

  1. Make a full backup of the site incase of data corruption
  2. Turn off Visual Composer in the plugins view
  3. Run the shortcode cleaner plugin which should remove all the now unused Visual Composer shortcodes
  4. Run the Ghost export plugin again to produce a cleaner export file

The above is just a theory so make sure to create a backup of your site, or perform this task on a local copy to avoid any downtime on the live site.

Let us know if you go ahead with this and how you get on. This process may help other people who are in a similar situation :raised_hands:

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