Importing a Multiple-Author Blog to TypePad

I'm paying Six Apart $300 a year for a premium subscription to TypePad, which gives me an unlimited number of multiple-author weblogs that can be hosted on my own domains. I recently decided to move Watching the Watchers to TypePad, because I'd like the site's writers to have a more friendly user interface, but I've run into a dealbreaker -- the software doesn't import the authors of blog entries. All 1,400 articles on the site are stored in my name.

TypePad supports multiple authors and Six Apart's weblog import format, which has an Author field, but the software ignores this information when you import:

TypePad is unable to import posts from different authors. If a post was created by a different author, it will be associated with the weblog's owner instead. This would require that TypePad create the authors during the import process and this feature is currently unavailable.

I can probably work around this by making each author a category, but that's a clumsy kludge, so I'm going to bang on Six Apart first and see if they might change this policy. I've opened up a support ticket and contacted some of my homies at the company.

Blogging · Typepad · 2008/05/31 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

It's actually not a policy, it's a technical limitation. Guest authors have their own accounts and their posts are associated with those accounts. The posts are then a part of your weblog.

There isn't a way to import the posts and the system to know the account to associate those posts with, so it automatically assigns the posts to the account owner to avoid the import from erroring. The major issue would happen if there was a post from a guest author who didn't also have a TypePad account.

I don't know the plan for correcting this currently, so I apologize that we don't have more information about that.

If you have further questions, please be sure to let us know in your help ticket.

Thanks,
Colleen
TypePad Support

#1 · Colleen · 2008/05/31

Frustrating, isn't it? Even worse, to the best of my knowledge, there's no way to change the author of a post once created. Between this and the lack of support for subcategories, it's enough to make me want to leave TypePad.

#2 · Anirvan · 2009/01/28