{"id":13760,"date":"2009-02-17T09:22:26","date_gmt":"2009-02-17T16:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/?p=13760"},"modified":"2009-02-17T10:51:55","modified_gmt":"2009-02-17T17:51:55","slug":"converting-from-movable-type-to-wordpress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/02\/17\/converting-from-movable-type-to-wordpress.html","title":{"rendered":"Converting from Movable Type to WordPress"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, here’s my stab at what I did and why. This is a conversion from a Movable Type 4.01 blog (set up with dynamic publishing for everything except the index.html<\/em>) to WordPress 2.7.<\/p>\n

Of course, you should check out the documentation on installation, starting here<\/a>, most specifically the standard installation doc<\/a> (and for the most part here I won’t repeat its info, just point out areas where I varied from it or where there was specific application of some points to my work). Print it out, scribble notes. etc. There’s also a specific and very useful WP codex document on importing from MT<\/a> (there’s also an interesting, if bigger-scale project described here<\/a>, and you can find a lot of info on the subject via Google, though of varying value, currency, or technical expertise).<\/p>\n

I have multiple MT blogs. WordPress seems to offer three choices to handle that:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Use a multi-blog setup like WordPressMU<\/a>. <\/li>\n
  2. Create multiple blogs within the same WP database in MySQL (with each blog’s tables having their own prefix).<\/li>\n
  3. Create multiple WP databases in MySQL (with the tables inside all being standard).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For mostly aesthetic reasons, I decided on #2. This document just addresses the movement of my main blog from MT to WP.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    As prep work, I saved copies (printouts and source files) of my front page, my CSS flie, etc., for future easy reference. I’m not actually deleting the blog out of MT (yet), but they’ll be convenient.<\/p>\n

    1. I did a test conversion on a little blog I had that made no difference. That informed some of the below choices, and gave me the confidence that I wasn’t going to royally mess things up.<\/p>\n

    2. I had over 13,500 entries in my MT blog, so I knew that the WP import routine (limited to 2Mb files) would choke. I created an MT index template that emulated the Export output, but let me choose a subset of the files at the time. You can find examples of this around on the Net. I essentially had an <MTEntries lastn=”500″ offset=”0″> <\/em>container for the template, and had it associated with an export file export1.txt<\/em>. I’d run it, and when it finished, I’d go in, increase the offset by 500 (offset = “500”, etc.) change the file to export2.txt<\/em>, and repeated. <\/p>\n

    This took 28 iterations (i.e., up to export28.txt<\/em>), and then I went through and validated the start\/end dates of the posts in each one to make sure I hadn’t goofed up and missed anything. And, in fact, I had, so that double-check kept me from losing 500 entries.<\/p>\n

    An alternative to this would have been to tried to run the full export out of MT as normal, then manually break up the file through a text editor. There was an original reason I didn’t do this (I wanted to save the post ID in the export file), but it didn’t matter in the end, so that’s a fully workable alternative.<\/p>\n

    3. One of the biggest challenges I faced was in not wanting to lose my copious internal links within my blog, both trackbacks and simple links. The complications are that there were three different types of permalinks to the files. From 8\/01 to 12\/05, archives used the post number for the file name, e.g., \/blog\/mtarchive\/0045678.html<\/em>. After that, I started using a 15-byte dirified title, e.g., \/blog\/2007\/04\/18\/happy_anniversa.html<\/em>. In 9\/06, I changed that to a dirified title of up to 25 bytes, e.g., \/blog\/2009\/01\/05\/happy_birthday_to_me_tod.html<\/em> <\/p>\n

    The codex document “Importing from Movable Type to WordPress<\/a>,” though obsolete in some generalities, summarizes well how to do this conversion, and offers a variety of strategies. I early on decided I didn’t want to do a massive mod_rewrite section in my .htaccess file, nor did I want to generate 14K post files that did redirections. I decided (and determined through experimentation with that same test blog) that I could get by on the dirified titles, though there were a couple of complications:<\/p>\n