I’m happy to announce the release of WordPress Export to Markdown v3! With this milestone, I figured I’d take a moment to share some backstory and talk about the development of this project.
What Is It?
WordPress Export to Markdown is a CLI tool (a Node script) that helps you migrate from WordPress to a static site generator (like Eleventy, for example). It does this by converting your WordPress export file into Markdown files, as well as downloading and saving all your images.
The end results is all of your site content, collected and formatted to begin a new life as a static site.
A key feature is the user-friendly wizard that guides you through the process, asking you questions about the output you want. There are command line arguments for more advanced options, if you really want to fine-tune things.
New in v3
The v3 release streamlines the wizard and makes it more intuitive. Some questions were combined into multiple choice questions. Questions that affect filenames and folder structures will now show you an example path for each option, so you can see exactly what the result will be.
Advanced options are easier to use. Previously, you had to edit a settings.js file, which never felt great to me. Now everything can be set via command line arguments.
Draft posts are now saved. This was a long-standing feature request and I’m glad to finally get it in.
And of course, lots of bug fixes, refactoring, and quality of life improvements. Check the full release notes for more details.
Sharing It with the World
I first started working on this thing way back in 2018, in preparation for migrating this very blog from WordPress to GatsbyJS. I thought others might find it useful, so I open-sourced it.
Since then, the project has been starred over 1,200 times and forked over 240 times on GitHub.
WordPress Export to Markdown has been recommended in the official documentation for Eleventy, Astro, and TinaCMS.
It’s also been mentioned in a ton of blog posts by folks writing about migrating from WordPress to their static site generator of choice.
“So long story short: wordpress-export-to-markdown is a phenomenal tool that I’d highly recommend to anybody looking to export WordPress content as Markdown.” – Josh Collinsworth
“Learning about this script made the process SO MUCH EASIER because I didn’t have to manually convert each post 💃🏼” – Kedasha Kerr
“This project made my migration an absolute breeze. Not only did it take a standard WordPress export, but it does a damn amazing job at reformatting everything in markdown… lonekorean my dude, I love you.” – Muffn
Next Steps
So what’s next? Well, I tend to work on this project in waves, as my time and mental energy allows. There are still some feature requests on the list I’ll probably get to eventually. I do have one big idea, but it might be a while before I get to it. We’ll see!