Migrating WordPress comments into Ghost native comments?

Developer help Migrations
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I’ve been waiting for native comments for a long time before switching: 3.0 is out: comments supported? - #15 by bert_o_t VERY exciting to see them here finally.

I’m on WordPress currently, and wondering if it will be possible to migrate comments from there in a similar fashion. I’ve done a content migration locally which went very well enough so encouraged to see if it is possible to get all my comments over into Ghost too?

In WP, the commenters typically have an email address so was wondering whether it would be possible to make them as users with a random password in Ghost?

Noticed this post Importing third-party comments into the native commenting system - #4 by ryansechrest but that seemed to be going from something already Ghost related.

Has anyone attempted something similar moving from WP to Ghost?

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I think @ryansechrest had the right idea in the linked post-- Comments are not yet part of the Ghost “Admin API”, so the next best target is directly inserting comments in the database.

As for Members, they are supported in the Admin API, and the only required field is an email address: Ghost Admin API Documentation

So that this point I think you’d need a bit of coding which creates the members as needed, tracks the member IDs tied to email addresses and then directly inserts the comments into the database.

OR, look at the open source Admin API and see about extending it to support adding comments.

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@markstos thanks for the info. Will have to weigh up how how much I want the historical comments migrated compared to how much I want to just enjoy getting things up, running and switched over to Ghost!

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My decision was easier because at the time Ghost didn’t support comments.

I still have an old blog with WordPress and the more I use them side by side, the more prefer Ghost!

The places were Ghost is “too minimal” are less frustrating than dealing with too many WordPress plugins, too much comment spam, and too many security updates.

If there are a few awesome comments, maybe you could migrate them by hand and make them part of the body content, but if there are a lot of good comments, it’s a tougher decision.

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@benfrain - Hi Ben - Bringing Wordpress comments is also a major sticking point for me and I’d imagine many, many other WP users (there’s enough of them! :heart_eyes:).

It’s great Ghost supports comments now, but bringing over historic WP comments is a must.

I’d love to hear from anyone whose done this - or could do it.