Ran into an issue this afternoon while playing around with the export / import from WordPress into a free standing WordPress site.

When I ran the import of the WordPress.com generated export XML file, I was given an error resembling the following:

Failure to import… Invalid post type.

STOP THE PRESSES!  Wasn’t this a WordPress.com generated export???  Fubar, I say!

Anyway, after some hunting, it is actually possible to upload a GZip file in the import, and I followed these simple steps to get the task done — Albeit I had to fire up an Amazon AWS EC2 instance to achieve step #1 as I cannot install that on my Chromebook!

  1. Download and Install 7zip.
  2. Right click on your .XML file -> 7zip -> Add to Archive
  3. Change the “Archive format” to gzip and hit “OK”
  4. Try to import the file again (using the .gz you just created) and it should work.

This was taken from a post by “Amber” on this WordPress.org Support Fourm: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/failure-to-import-and-invalid-post-type-errors#post-4113189