WordPress MU

I'm converting an old stand alone wordpress site to wpmu/buddypress as the root blog and I'm trying to figure out the best way to get my old content imported into the new site. I need to know what is best to get all of my old images/media into the media library and hopefully ensure that my old post are pointed to the right location. I have two options.

1. Access to old database and export out of the wp_post and wp_postmeta tables.

2. Export to xml from back end.

I know that if you export it out, it can import the media as well. What I need to know is if it's safer/easier to edit the .sql file of the raw database tables and edit the url's for the img src's and then manually upload all of the files to the blog.dir/1 location or if I should edit in the xml file with the correct urls so that it adds the files to the media library and imports and adds the 3 different sizes of files. Any thoughts?

You could cheat and upload the images folder from your old blog and park it under the wp-content folder. That saves a lot of editing.

If I did that though, I'd have to make the uploadpath to wp-content, which probably wouldn't be good long term, wouldn't you think?

Also, if I did "cheat" wouldn't that mean that the files wouldn't be available in my media library because it won't know that they're there?

Also, another thing I'm trying to do is to consolidate image paths from old themes and versions of the site that all had images called from different locations i.e. /images, /themes/blah/images, etc. I'm going to have to edit all the paths and want to put all images into one central location, which seems like it would be best as the default upload path with all the files in the media library so that we can get away from manually uploading any more files to the site.

nah, Steve means for the old content. Then moving forward, you'd use the new locations MU gives you.

yes, this means MU won't "see" the old files in the media manager.

I have had to place them in both places - the "old" default single WP location & the new file structure.

Thats what I meant andrea - maybe I didn't make it clear, I was trying to debug a very odd bug in some code at the same time.

Are there any consequences in putting files in the wp-content/uploads folder on the root blog of an MU installation? Does anything else ever get tried to be uploaded there?

I just want to clean up the site because as I've moved from server to server, files have gone to different locations. Just a developer suggestion but do you think it's cleaner to edit the xml file to update urls or to edit the .sql dump for the tables to accomplish this? I tried to follow instructions to migrate from wp to wpmu but I made the xml backup just in case so i have both.

No - WPMU knows nothing about it so basically it becomes a read only source.

Thanks Steve. Do you have any thoughts on if it would be a cleaner import with either editing the xml or the .sql file?