I maintain a Laravel site that is basically a content management system. It works fine, but with time I realized I keep implementing stuff WordPress solved many years ago. It made sense to switch.

But how? This Laravel site is almost like a blog with custom structures I made up 6 years ago. Translating them to WordPress objects surely needs lot of custom code.

I don’t remember how I arrived at this conclusion but instead of working with SQL imports or CSVs, I decided to target WXR (WordPress Extended RSS) files. I thought if I can whip up a WXR file with my data in the correct format, importing it to WordPress should be easier than other methods.

So I built a library named wefg: WordPress Export File Generator.

This is a regular old PHP library that you can include in any project with Composer.

Once included, you have the libraries’ classes at your disposal to describe a WXR file in PHP.

And with that, you hopefully have a working WXR… that’s pretty much it. I’ll speculate AI is very likely to one-shot this for you.

I’m very pleased with the idea. I looked around a bit but didn’t find a similar tool so there you go. So hope you like and use it and help me improve it on GitHub.

Final remarks regarding AI: It’s hard for me to do coding afterhours as I feel very much drained after work. So project was progressing very slowly. One thing I got right was tests: it had good tests. Especially I was proud of the integration tests.

You probably know where this is going… When agent TUIs come out, I basically fed the my work-in-progress code into it and it went in a feedback loop to basically complete everything in probably 30 minutes? That’s the moment I realized you need to close the loop.