Carthik Sharma

The Codex MT import Guide now contains detailed directions, with links.

Mena says It’s about time, and I can’t agree more. It’s about time Movable Type users moved to WordPress.

A lot of MT users might want to move to WordPress, but may have a lot of questions and doubts regarding the move, and about WordPress. I thought a short post with essential resources, tips and answers will come in handy to at least a few people, so here goes.

Downloading and Installing WordPress:
WordPress 1.2 “Mingus” is now ready, get it from The sourceforge download page.

Importing MT entries:
You can import all your MT entries into WordPress using the import-mt.php script that ships with WordPress, which can be found in the wp-admin folder.
Updates:

1. MT exports the entries with the dates set wrong. The dates do not carry AM/PM or 24 hour information. There is a Fix for the date problem at the MT support forums.
2. WordPress uses UTF-8 as the default encoding. So if your MT blog uses ISO 8859-1 or Latin - 1 to encode posts, convert the posts to UTF-8 before importing, to ensure that all characters display properly. Optionally you could also set an Option (Option -> Reading -> Character Encoding) in WordPress to set the Charset for the WP weblog to ISO 8859-1.
3. The import-mt.php that ships with 1.2 had a couple of bugs, which I fixed. The new import-mt.php is available for use. Read the post at scriptygoddess. Use this to ensure the backslashes in your posts are treated properly, and the “——–” strings in your posts do not break anything.

The MT import tutorial is there if you need help, and be sure to read the notes at the end to see how you can refer visitors to your new WP powered blog from the old MT urls, and other such bits and pieces.
Edit: If you are having trouble importing all the entries at once, getting timed out on the import etc, this thread has some pointers regarding how to work around it.

Modifying your template, stylesheets:
1. LaughingLizard’s Well commented index.php should be helpful in understanding the wordpress index.php file/template.
2. The template tags are explained at the template tags wiki page, and Gregory Auld has written a nice article comparing the MT and WP “template tags”, which should also be of help.
3. NuclearMoose’s Annotated default CSS and podz’ Graphical CSS are excellent guides to the default css stylesheet that ships with WordPress.

Growing wings:
A few very useful wordpress links:
1. The WordPress Wiki - I find myself here at the beginning of a search for a hack/plugin/technique all the time.
2. The Support Forums - search and you shall find
3. AlexKing.org WP styles competition - for awesome ready-to-use stylesheets (…and how to use them).
4. WeblogToolsCollection.com - The blog with loads of tips and useful links.

A few answers:
Multiple blogs using WordPress:
From the trackbacks to Mena’s post above, it seems like a lot of people think it impossible to use WordPress to run multiple weblogs. It is possible to use wordpress to run multiple weblogs off of the same server, with just one MySQL database. I have 7 WP weblogs running on one server! All it takes is to install wordpress multiple times. Each blog would have a different MySQL table prefix. Installing a wordpress blog takes less than five minutes (I agree it could take longer to get the template and stylesheet modified), and so, it’s not only possible, but really easy to have more than one blog powered by wordpress on your server.

Rebuilds and pages:
WordPress does not have to rebuild any pages each time you update your blog. It uses PHP to dynamically create pages on the fly, and is real quick, too. (You can see how much time it took to create and display this page at the bottom of this page)
This also means that all you need to have is one template - index.php. The individual entry “pages”, the archives and everything else is created by WordPress depending on the parameters passed to the index.php file.

Keeping your MovableType links:Last Edited July 10th, 2004
You can redirect visitors to pages on your old Movable Type blog to the correct ones on your new WordPress blog using some readily available solutions. If you are only concerned about search engines, most of them will catch up with the changes in the URLs within a certain amount of time. The following solutions work for both kinds of urls, ones that use the ‘post_id’, like so — http://example.com/000121.html, and the ones that are ‘dirified’, like so — http://example.com/archives/2004/05/12/this_post . For some solutions for the former type, you may need to keep your MT installation around until the search engines are updated to reflect the changes in your blog. This is because of the fact that the MT export file does not provide the ‘post_id’ s for the posts. For dirified urls, there should be no problem.
Update: If your MT permalinks had the post ids in them, then with a little code-fu, you can get wordpress to use the same post ids as MT, and the detailed directions, complete with required changes is available at Dr. Bacchus’ Journal.

1. Alex King’s MovableType template to redirect visitors
2. Matt’s Solution.
3. Idly.org’s solution

Licensing and other issues:
WordPress is distributed under the GPL, and will remain Free Software. Period.

Please leave a comment if you have any questions, or if you find a resource not listed here very useful in making the transition.

Filed by Carthik at 1:24 am under Blogging, WordPress

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