I’ve received a lot of emails lately from IntenseDebate users interested in moving their blog from Blogger to WordPress, along with their IntenseDebate comments. Moving your IntenseDebate comments from one blog platform to another may seem like a simple task, but the changes in post ID and URL structures can lead to some difficulties.
Luckily our good buddy and fellow Boulderite, Josh Fraser, wrote an excellent plugin for moving your IntenseDebate comments from Blogger to WordPress. Josh’s plugin has been around for some time now (over a year!) and it’s been tested pretty thoroughly – so far it has performed flawlessly (a testament of Josh’s coding wizardry).
So, if you’re planning on moving from Blogger to WordPress, you can download Josh’s Blogspot2WP plugin at http://www.intensedebate.com/misc/blogspot2wp.zip. You’ll need to install it the old-fashioned way, via your FTP client, and drop it in your WP-Content → Plugins folder. Make sure you install, activate, and run the Blogspot2WP plugin before you install the IntenseDebate WordPress plugin. Give us a shout at support@intensedebate.com with any questions.
Please note: IntenseDebate is and will always be platform agnostic, and will always be available for use with any CMS and blog platform.
Some info if you’re interested in moving your blog from Blogger to WordPress:
Making the transition is pretty painless thanks to the Blogger importer built-in to the WordPress core. You can use the importer to transfer all of your Blogger posts, native Blogger comments, and users. The importer is available in your WordPress admin panel under Tools → Import → Blogger. You can learn more about importing in the WordPress Codex.
Today we released version 2.6 of our WordPress plugin, which is available in the WordPress Plugin Directory, or via your WordPress dashboard. It’s been a while since we released a new version of our WordPress plugin (over 2 months actually). That’s because we’ve been pushing-out all the new features and code on our end, rather than making you update all the time – no one likes upgrade fatigue.
Version 2.6 has a few minor changes that are needed to make the IntenseDebate plugin fully compatible with certain combinations of WordPress 2.9 and PHP.
If you’re already using the plugin without any problems then it’s not critical that you update, but it’s always a good idea to stay up-to-date with the latest versions. If you had any problems getting the plugin working previously, now is a great time to give IntenseDebate another try. Version 2.6 should be the perfect cure for your plugin fever.
Even cooler yet, that statistic does not include the total number of Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, Tumblr, Joomla, Squarespace, iWeb, Ning, Omeka, Drupal, or Generic installs of IntenseDebate.
Thanks for your continued support and for helping us spread the word about IntenseDebate. Here’s to the next 100,000!
Last month Beau spoke at WordCamp NYC and he had the opportunity to demo IntenseDebate. Since we thought internet access might be a problem, Beau pre-recorded a screencast (using iShowU for Mac) running through all the features, then just talked over the top. The first video (below) is the pre-recorded screencast, and the second video provides audio and some shots of Beau speaking. Play them both at the same time and it’s like you’re actually there!
It’s been a while now (almost 3 months!) since the last update to our WordPress plugin, and a lot has been going on here at IntenseDebate HQ since then. We’ve been working on our end to improve how the plugin interacts with our servers, and now we’re ready to release a new version which updates how it operates as well. Here are some of the new and improved bits in this version:
Added a bunch of new API functions to enable better remote queue management (for syncing): get comment counts, get approved comment counts, get a copy of your sync queue, manage individual operations, lock queue temporarily
Improved handling of duplicate comments
Improved syncing on comment statuses
Fixed a bug with closing comments on a Post/Page
Added partial support for the Trash feature coming in WordPress 2.9*
Added functionality to allow us to re-import a single Post to help fix up any sync problems (more efficient than re-importing your entire site)
Lots of small improvements and fixes to the way the sync queue operates to avoid overloading your site (and ours) and to increase the success of requests.
* We’re going to be releasing an update in the near future, once we sort out a few remaining issues with the Trash functionality. When you upgrade to WordPress 2.9 (once it’s released!) you’ll also want to upgrade to that new version.
This version of the plugin has gone through a load of testing on WordPress versions 2.5, right up to the current “trunk” and WordPressMU version 2.6 to the current release (2.8.5.2). We’d like to note that in the next versions, we’re going to drop support for versions of WordPress below 2.7, so if for some reason you’re running an old version of WordPress, we’d strongly recommend that you upgrade!
If you are already using IntenseDebate on your WordPress blog then you should see a plugin update notification in your admin dashboard soon. If you haven’t tried us out yet, then now is the perfect time, with our best plugin release to date! You can search for the plugin (“IntenseDebate Comments”) under Plugins > Add New, or download it directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory.
