Indeed, this took a bit more than we planned, but it's ready. You're welcome to convert qTranslate to WPML sites using our brand new qTranslate Importer.
The plugin is available right now from the WordPress repository:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/qtranslate-to-wpml-export/
It's a two-trick pony.
In its cleanup mode, it will remove all those qTranslate language meta tags from your content. If you've ever experimented with qTranslate, you might have noticed that the site's content becomes irreversibly corrupt with language meta tags (without qTranslate, these are HTML comments).
You can use the qTranslate Importer to just cleanup the database. Activate it and use without WPML and you'll get to the cleanup mode.
The WPML import mode will convert the content from qTranslate to WPML. It processes pages, posts, tags, categories, custom fields and all custom posts and taxonomy types. Instead of having different languages mixed in the database, each language will go to its own separate location (post, taxonomy or meta).
The plugin also adjusts all internal and incoming links to the new URLs, fixes the page hierarchy and more.
When you're trying this conversion, please keep some basics in mind:
- Don't run this on live sites. Download a development version of the site and work on this locally.
- Go over the results and review them. You'll most likely find some things that the conversion script didn't manage to handle. Check your content and the WordPress setting screens.
- Learn how to use WPML's String Translation. You'll most certainly need this to translate non-post items.
To get started, review the qTranslate to WPML importer guide.
We're eager to hear how this is working for you. Let us know!