I’ve recently had the unfavourable job of con­vert­ing some 400 posts on my WordPress-powered site into pages. I’d been putting this off for a while, as as far as I could see the only sane way of doing this was using p2pConverter — a great plu­gin for con­vert­ing indi­vid­ual posts to pages and back, but sadly with no bulk con­ver­sion capability.

I had a num­ber of post cat­e­gories, and I wanted all the posts in each cat­e­gory to become pages under­neath a cer­tain pre-existing page. The advan­tage with this scheme is that if the old cat­e­gory and the new par­ent page have the same name, the URL of the page doesn’t change dur­ing con­ver­sion. (e.g. a post “Suc­cess­Whale” in cat­e­gory “Soft­ware” has the URL /software/successwhale, and so does a page “Suc­cess­Whale” under­neath a par­ent page “Software”.)

In the end, I wran­gled some SQL to do the job. This is how I did it.

Before any­thing else, back up your data­base! I am not respon­si­ble if you break your site by fol­low­ing these instructions.

After back­ing up, I fired up MySQL Query Browser and pointed at my data­base. You could use that, or php­MyAd­min if your host pro­vides it, or even a command-line inter­face on the MySQL server if you so desire.

Back in the web browser, head to the Dash­board. We need to get two num­bers — the ID num­ber of the cat­e­gory you’re mov­ing posts from, and the ID num­ber of the par­ent page you want the new pages to sit under. For the first, pull down the Posts menu and click Cat­e­gories. On the right-hand side, hover over the “Edit” link under a cat­e­gory name.

On your sta­tus bar, you should see the loca­tion that link is point­ing to. At the end there should be a num­ber, such as the ‘14’ in this example.

To get the sec­ond num­ber, click the Pages menu on the side­bar. Just as before, hover over the Edit link of the page you want to be a parent.

And again, the sta­tus bar text will end with a num­ber, which you need to note down. Here, it’s ‘890’.

Now back to the MySQL Query Browser. Before jump­ing in with a move straight away, we should check what we’re about to move just to make sure we’ve got it right. Exe­cute the fol­low­ing query, replac­ing 14 with the first num­ber you obtained earlier:

SELECT *
FROM wp_posts, wp_term_relationships
WHERE (wp_posts.id = wp_term_relationships.object_id)
AND (wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = 14)
AND (wp_posts.post_type = "post");

This should pro­duce a list of the posts you want to move, and only those posts. If it does, great! Edit the fol­low­ing query, replac­ing 14 with your first num­ber from ear­lier, and 890 with the sec­ond number:

UPDATE wp_posts, wp_term_relationships
SET wp_posts.post_type = "page",
wp_posts.post_parent = 890
WHERE (wp_posts.id = wp_term_relationships.object_id)
AND (wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = 14)
AND (wp_posts.post_type = "post")

Exe­cute that, and you should be done! Check the Posts and Pages sec­tions of the Dash­board to make sure it’s worked as you expected.

In my expe­ri­ence, the first query will some­times not return exactly what it should. In this case, I’m afraid I don’t have a clever solu­tion — this prob­lem occurred with less than half a dozen posts for me, so I just con­verted them with p2pConverter.

If you have more cat­e­gories of posts to con­vert, repeat this pro­ce­dure again until you’ve got them all done.

I hope you’ve found this useful!