In short, this past week of the Summer of Code has been a rebuilding and planning week. In addition to filling out midterm surveys and reports, I shifted gears toward media importing.

Why Import Media?

The first question I asked myself this week is why should TypePad’s media be imported into WordPress. This was a relatively easy question to answer. TypePad, being a paid service, will delete and remove all content when canceled. This includes images uploaded and stored in TypePad’s cloud. So, importing images and the like is important if a TypePad switcher does not want to see broken images all over the place.

Can TypePad Media Be Imported?

After determining media importing is essential, I explored my options for getting media into WordPress. Thankfully, TypePad has an AtomAPI for their web galleries. Unfortunately, from my testing this Atom API does not include single image uploads. So, the Atom API may be out of the question for media importing.

Since Atom API media importing appears out of the question, I started looking at their XML-RPC documentation. To no surprise, they do not have a method for retrieving media through XML-RPC. Therefore, I’m left with one option: finding media through URLs during the import process.

Sadly, this option is not ideal. For one, it will add time to the already slow import process. Also, this option will force media to be imported at the time of the initial import, since the content can only easily be traversed during the post import. So, I’m not too pleased with my options.

Next Week

Next week I plan on starting to code the media importing during the import process. I plan on making this optional, since it will most likely add significant time to the import process. However, before I do that, I will go through my options one more time. If anyone thinks of any alternatives from now until then, I’d love to hear them.