Okay, well I misspent my Friday afternoon plowing into WordPress, methodically walking through documentation both centralized and diverse. None of this was helped by my site running like molasses — which, of course, was the driver to making it all work.

Stacy’s observation was that the main problem was with this, my main blog, that the Black Hats were busy hammering away at it, as opposed to the other blogs on the site. That’s the most prominent one, and the one whose files are being hardest hit by mindless spambots trying to have their way with me. In other words, my Cunning Plan to slowly convert things over to WP, with ***Dave Does the Blog being next-to-last on the list, was not actually all that good an idea.

*sigh*

However, I wasn’t going to start with my main blog first, as my initial dive into WordPress. So I chose an obscure genealogy blog I’ve never really gotten off the ground, did my install (carefully), played with some of the options, got it to work and play well … and (eventually) felt ready to let it rock.

So, I have a WP blog now. Woot.

The next step is, based on the problems here, the Big Kahuna, this main DDtB blog. I’m not going to tackle that tonight (it’s late, it’s Friday, I’m tired, I’ve had a few glasses of wine — none of these are good for screwing around with your blog), but I will probably take the plunge tomorrow. 

Which means a few things for you, my myriad loyal readers:

1. Any comments you post (until I say otherwise) will possibly not get transferred over. After I’m done with this post, I’ll be working on staging an export of all the content here, etc.
2. This blog may be a bit wonky tomorrow. Which would likely be an improvement on “nearly non-functional” the way it has been the past week or so.
3. Expect, up front, a fairly bare-bones blog page. It’s going to take me some time to recreate all the myriad spiffiness that is the current iteration of ***Dave Does the Blog. Especially since I’m pretty clueless viz WordPress templating and the like.

And, boy, am I already tired of my brain turning “WP” into “WordPerfect.” Which, I suppose, dates me pretty badly.

A couple of notes on my implementation.

First off, I’m going to go ahead and install parallel installs of WP for each of the blogs I’m bringing over. That’s mitigated a bit by the fact I’m not doing it all at once — indeed, that’s a feature, not a bug. I’m ready to deal with the annoyance of multiple configurations for the time being.

Second, I think I’ve skinned the “old links” issue. The best info going out there on MT-to-WP stuff remains this WP Codex article, even though it’s aging and is flagged as possibly obsolete. It contains (along with pointers to a lot of other info) a number of different ways to maintain your old MT links after the import to WP. That’s been my biggest bugbear to worry over. The ultimate solution for me — I believe — is found in the section labelled “Forcing Wordpress to Use the Movable Type Permalink Structure.” In other words, if MT called something A, and you can get WP to call it A, then all those links will work. 

That turns out to be a lot more complicated than it sounds — and for DDtB, it’s not helped by the fact that up until MT allowed (natively) for title-based filenames, I stuck with the numeric EntryID filenames. Nor by the fact that MT uses underscores between words in title-based filenames, while WP uses dashes. Nor that MT uses (generally) a shorter filename …

Bottom line is, I won’t be able to lock in all of the old links. But I can lock in a lot of them, especially the newer ones (past few years), using the SQL cheats in that Codex (from what I’ve been able to experiment with), so I’m fairly happy. While there are ways I could have made both nomenclatures worked, they would have been a lot less elegant and a leave a lot more footprints (and require in some cases I keep MT installed).

So, I think I have a handle on the parts that have been worrying me. We’ll see how it goes.

A note on WP documentation. Yes, there’s a lot of it. But a lot of it is obsolete over the various updates (though, to be fair, it’s often flagged as such). And a lot of it really doesn’t clearly explain stuff. It’s akin to reading archetype guides at the City of Heroes forum — there’s a hell of a lot of good info there, and a lot more than if you only depended on the company to crank out Official Stuff — but sometimes there’s a competition as to whether you can actually find the pony in that pile of docs.

It’s still better, though, that what MT has to offer. The current MT documentation, for 4.x, is even worse than the scattershot 3.x stuff. I was trying to cobble together a date format, and it took forever to track down the parameters to use — and I still ended up going to the 3.x docs to find out how to produce an AM/PM marker.  

WP doesn’t seem to support a category hierarchy — which is probably okay, but will take some cogitation.

The install creates an “admin” userid. It took me a bit to realize that I simply need to create a “Dave” userid with admin rights to not have to worry about having to log in and out of different IDs.

While DDtB and Blog of Heroes and Doing Write and Boulder Dude all use title-based filenames, Margie’s Kitchen uses EntryID numeric-based ones. Most of the concern there, though, is with outside links, and I’ve already given up worrying about those, so I’ll probably convert her and not worry about it.

WIST continues to loom a bit large on how to make it work, given my use of categories and subcategories (which WP seems a bit weak on). But if the driver to health for my overall site is getting DDtB off onto something less vulnerable, I’ll have time to work on that.

I’m aiming at installing my WP stuff in the directory below each actual blog’s directory, to avoid cluttering it up. That means I need to use the info in this codex to have WP and the blog root be different things (the doc has a few obsolete passages in it, but nothing that can’t be worked around on the fly).

Rather than relying on the built-in MT export routine, I created an index template in MT that included much the same info. The main advantage is that it finesses all the “Convert Breaks” stuff, which I’ve been inconsistent on over the years. That makes it a lot easier for WP t digest. I also take the output file and covert it (through my text editor) to UTF-8, which is what WP uses.

And here we go.