Shifting to WordPress...maybe

I got tired of seeing this post sitting in Drafts, so here it is.

Yesterday [I've had this post sitting in Drafts for a very long time, so I'm not actually sure when "yesterday" was. -Ed.], I decided to test WordPress and see how it works on my server. I was under the impression (due to this) that I wouldn't be able to run it. However, I went through the setup process and messed around with settings for awhile without ever seeing the "Database Error: Too Many Connections" message that I got when testing Mambo. I'm not sure if that means it'll be okay, or if I just put Mambo through more rigorous changes (although I'm thinking it's the second one).

The other problem is porting my Blogger stuff over into WordPress. They have a utility for importing Blogger posts, but they haven't updated it to include Blogger comments. All we see on the support forum are people asking whether or not there's a way to do it; one guy suggests exporting to Moveable Type format and then importing that to WordPress, but I hate that idea. It's too messy.

Looking at their tutorial and then examining the file in question, I got it into my head that maybe I could import the comments by modifying the file so that it would parse the comments and put them into the proper database fields. However, I was rather daunted by this task, and so I put it off for weeks.

Today [The real today. -Ed.], I started actually messing with it, just to see what would happen. At first I worked under the assumption that I would have to grab each comment while I was still within the "for" loop of the corresponding post. However, this didn't work. Finally, I remembered how to telnet into the database, so I took a look at how WordPress does its comments table. It contains the following columns:

comment_ID
comment_post_ID
comment_author
comment_author_email
comment_author_url
comment_author_IP
comment_date
comment_date_gmt
comment_content
comment_karma
comment_approved
user_id

I assume that comment_post_ID tells the software which post the comment goes with. This makes things easier and harder at the same time. I think that to get the raw comments data, all I need to do is create a separate dump from Blogger that contains the comments only...but I'm not sure how to indicate which posts the comments go with, nor what value comment_post_ID should then be assigned.

Kind of stumped, but at least I have an idea of the direction I need to go.