Why We Created TP2WP

We’re Pete Snyder and Cord Blomquist, two web developers who had a problem to solve. In 2011 the creators of Marginal Revolution, the popular economics blog, wanted to migrate from Typepad to WordPress.

At the time, we had no idea how difficult it was going to be to get data out of Typepad, especially for a site with 7,000 posts and 140,000 comments. We found out that Typepad exports don’t include permalinks, comments, or images—the export is little more than text.

Complicated 17-step DIY methods existed for using this text export—along with importers, editors, redirects, and other methods—to painstakingly move data to WordPress. We thought we could build something that made this process easier.

We decided to turn the process on its head by converting Typepad export files (and by extension, Movable Type files) into WordPress’s own XML standard.

By converting Typepad data to WordPress XML, we can take advantage of all the great tools that WordPress offers.

That enabled us to a create custom importer that preserve links, images, comments, and the other content that you’ve spent years adding to your blog.

Compared to the old way of moving data between blogging platforms, TP2WP can seem to good to be true. But we believe it’s just the way things should be.