I just finished importing all my Blosxom entries into b2evolution. The process was more or less painless; I just pulled down all the Blosxom entries in Movable Type format using the flavor I mentioned earlier, then processed the result with a Perl script, then ran b2evolution’s Movable Type import utility to bring the entries in. The Perl script basically catenates lines together in the body area of each entry, which makes the result look more attractive in b2evolution. Once the entries were in, I went through and made minor edits to make things look better.

The only thing I don’t care for about b2evolution is its insistence on sticking <br> tags at the end of every line, even within blocks of markup. This makes it really hard to include code snippets, because I can’t use <pre> blocks; I have to explicitly format everything and use &nbsp; entities to do spacing. There must be a way to make this work right, but I haven’t found it yet.

That aside, it’s nice to have a “real” blogging engine with all the associated bells and whistles. I’m sure I’ll figure out all of b2evolution’s various quirks over time.

Followup — Looks like the <br> tag thing is controlled by the Auto-BR option at the bottom of the page where you edit posts. It seems to be turned on for all the imported entries, and off for the native entries. When Auto-BR is off, it seems to be much better behaved with embedded HTML in entries.

Made my first attempt at importing my Blosxom data into b2evolution this morning. Looks like it will be doable with just a bit of fussing. The basic strategy is to use this handy Blosxom flavor to convert the Blosxom data to Movable Type export format, then use b2evolution’s MT import utility to bring the data in. I tried this on a couple of entries, and it works, but I’ll need to do a bit of data munging. First off, the Blosxom flavor leaves an <h3> markup tag at the beginning of each post, which the importer doesn’t like. And, the importer seems to insist on sticking <br> tags at the end of every line, which makes for some ugly line breaks in the final product. There may be a way to control this behavior from the importer, but I think it’ll be just as easy to massage the import file with a Perl script. Next step is to do that, and try a few more test imports, before bringing in the whole enchilada.