Post Restoration Project - Dealing with WordPress Post-Kinds Data

At the start of the year I restored a lot of old posts to this site from a WordPress backup. While this worked great for posts that had “standard” content, I was missing hundreds of posts and even more metadata that relied on the IndieWeb Post-Kinds plugin for WordPress. In the export file this plugin data is largely stored as serialised PHP data structures within the XML.

The tool I used to convert the export didn’t know how to handle this data, so I’ve started a project to build a tool which can. It’s in very early stages (literally just a couple of files that aren’t joined up yet), but I think I’ve got one of the harder parts done - a utility function to parse the serialised PHP data into a usable JavaScript object:

There’s a lot still to do, and it’s going to take me a while to get there, but I’m one step closer to restoring the missing posts.