Moving from movable type to WordPress
Friday, May 14, 2004
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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 WordPress, Blogging
MT users might be interested in the MT to WP redirector script as well.
http://www.alexking.org/software/wordpress/mt-wp-redirect.zip
Alex, your redirect hack is linked-to from the import-mt manual, and so I already mentioned it above.
Is there a way to manage authors in WordPress? As in MT, where you can say Author A can do x,y and z while Author C can only do x.
you have user levels in WP and you can set the userlevel of a user, and also assign privileges based on userlevels, so the answer is yes.
thanks for the prompt reply. I must have ovelooked that fact that for each user level permissions can be set. However, is there some sort of hack/plugin which allows you to put a number in the user level instead of pressing plus and minus umpteen times?
Hmmm. I don’t really like the idea of dynamically-building pages. Blogs are simple enough that I’d rather just dump them to static html and allow apache to handily serve them. Start building pages dynamically, then there are cpu concerns, etc.
Can one guarantee that the urls of the existing blog articles you wrote in MovableType will be preserved under wordpress? ie: http://karavshin.org/blogs/black-coffee/archive/001469.html remains the url for that specific article after I migrate?
Are there external APIs you can use for publishing ? Any offline editors?
thanks
<3 WordPress <3
:p
Does WordPress address the comment spam issue? That’s the biggest reason I was thinking of moving from MT2 to MT3.
Regarding the “multiple blogs” question, apparently what people are looking for is centralized management of multiple blogs and users in one place, not just the ability to have multiple weblogs in one place -
“what I believe they mean by WP “not supporting multiple blogs” is that your blogs have to be separate WP installations, with separate user bases, and you can’t administer them from the same control panel (like you can in MT and EE)”
Anything in the works on that? Great resource page, by the way!
The drupal solution to comment spam is likely importable to WP (since it’s GPL, we’re free to do what we like) — in Drupal, they use XMLRPC to check your credentials from any other drupal site: if you login as mrg@www.teledyn.com, the authentication will request your password from www.teledyn.com (provided it’s not banned) and let you in as a first-level member. That way, if you forbid anon comments, you get an id trace on any abuse.
Of course, the hole in MT wasn’t so much anon comments as the way it was implemented at as CGI that did no verification of the referrer — organized crime quickly learned how to post directly to any blog ID by simply posting directly to a known mt-comment.cgi
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hey nice work…:)
No, there is not, it was not a problem for me! You can always go and edit the users table in the mysql database using phpMyadmin or similar, though, its really simple.
The devs are working on true multiple blog support, and when it does happen, it is said that you can easily integrate all the tables from different blogs together easily.
Michael - WordPress has some nifty comment-spam reduction methods. Check them out.
You can use some offline editors. I personally don’t use one, but a quick search of the support forums should let you know which ones are useful. Besides you can blog by email.
The importmt tutorial addresses three different ways you can maintain your current links, and forward/alias them to your wordpress equivalent.
Yes it does address the spam issue, you have a blacklist, a list of spam-words that acts as a filter, and email-based moderation. You can also limit the number of links that mark a comment as possible spam.
Michael Slater: sadly, no, you won’t be able to keep MT permalinks that use post IDs.
The fault is on MT’s export file, that does not export IDs. Since the current MT importer uses MT’s exports, the post IDs would be lost. Someone may work on an importer that converts data right from MT’s MySQL tables in the future, though, and then we would ship it with WordPress.
Michel, Michael, I edited the post to also explain in some detail how the redirects work, and how to keep the links alive.
It is possible to keep posts with post IDs alive, but the MT installation’s help might be required.
[…] y active. There are some very good resources available on the web to make this transition. More info about the move from Movable type to WordPress Redirecting MT URIs […]
[…] y active. There are some very good resources available on the web to make this transition. More info about the move from Movable type to WordPress Redirecting MT URIs […]
[…] of you who wish to abandon the wacky licensing and pricing restrictions of Moveable Type, Moving from movable type to WordPress is for you.
Comments […]
It’s easy to hack MT’s export to include the post ID. What I want to know is how to import it once I get it exported. How would I have to change mt-import.php to get it to use that? Would I have to add it into the ‘case’ section and what else would I have to do? I’m no php expert — yet.
Michael,
With regards to your comments about building the pages dynamically and hogging up resources is completely untrue. Well, at least in the case of the 5 linux servers I run all with a mixture of MT and WP blogs on them. Before, when I was completely MT on my blog servers, the CPU would consistently be at a 70-95% CPU usage when people were adding comments, building pages, rebuilding, etc. There was no way around the immense CPU usage that MT took with all of the perl scripts they ran. As a matter of fact, my last rebuild on my blog which isn’t very large at all (500 entries a couple of thousand of comments over some years) took a total of 30 minutes to rebuild. That and I pinned my CPU at 98% for this amount of time. Sure, serving the statically created pages barely made a dent on CPU usage, however you fail to take into consideration that adding an entry, adding comments and especially rebuilding all suck a good amount of CPU usage.
However, the one server I run that only has WP blogs on them, CPU usage barely topples 7% even with everyone on it posting and running searches at around the same times. The initial import of my blog which would probably be the most CPU intensive task my blog would ever run took a mere 10% of the CPU for a grand total of 5 and a half seconds.
Of course it all depends on how well you compile and install php, apache and mysql…
Does WP offer the ability to manage authors across multiple blogs? What about searches across mulitple blogs? I run a multi-blog site (www.fanblogs.com) in addition to my personal blog and that’s a deal breaker for me. Also, what about being able to load/share templates across multiple blogs? Can I link templates from one blog to the next?
From what I understand, WP is perfect for the folks that don’t need the above. For my purposes - it wouldn’t work, unless the above have been addressed. Update?
One thing I have to admit I love about wordpress is that the users are very helpful.
And they’ve got an IRC chatroom (I’m impressed) at irc.freenode.net #wordpress. It’s nice to be able to ask dumb questions in real time.
I’m working on an import-mt that will import with entry ids, when I get it done (probably a day or two to test), I’ll post a link over at the wordpress forums. I’ll have both the export needed (I’m going to do it via an index template rather than the mt-export function) and the hacked import-mt. I’ll try to post the link here too, so you can add it to the tuorial, but it will definitely be there if I forget to put it here.
I’m somewhat considering switching to wordpress now after reading this (since I’m not prepared to spend $200NZ on MT3). I remember from the b2 days that somebody wrote a Greymatter to b2 template converter and wonder if it’s possible to pull that off for MT and Wordpress…
Kathy… I’ve noticed that too - the WP forums are far friendlier than the MT ones. You hardly ever hear anyone snarl at a newbie.
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Hi,
Thanks for the article.
This is so useful that I translated into Japanese and put it on my blog.
http://tekapo.com/st/index.php?p=135
just in case you don’t like it, tell me so, I will delete it right away.
Also, I’d like to translated “MT import tutorial” and put it on a site, is it OK?
Welcome to WP
Thanks for this explanation!
With this I could move two MT-blogs to my localhost testsite.
Looking at a price-increase of $200 for a 0.339 version update of MT… (you heard it all before)
Question:
I am “misusing” the chronological archive method of a MT blog for an events-page. It seems that the dynamic blog-tools as WP and TP are not usable for this. Although they allow to set an entry date to the future, they will not publish it today. Why? If I didn’t want to publish an entry I could use the publish status “draft” or “private”. My visitors do like to read about old events, but future events are far more interesting! Does anyone know a way to overcome this?
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Regarding offline editors, there’s one coming up shortly: wbloggar (www.wbloggar.com). Cheers.
Just so I know - will importing into WordPress retain all the categories I have divided my posts into? And is the template importing automagical or will I need to edit a bunch of tags afterwards to ensure the result looks just like I had before?
[…] 7;ll be switching faster than you think . Word Press Moving from movable type to WordPress [Carthik.net]
I just switched last night. Worked very well. The only problem I had was my MT entries had extra line breaks. Oh well. I’m working on cleaning them up with a Word macro. Not fun but doable.
So Far MT is great. Installed in just a few minutes. Love the features!
I too am very interested in switching from MT to WP, but would first like some user feedback on private entries/restricted posts? I understand WP has this capability and would like to know how well it works. This is the main reason for my wanting to switch, but I’m a bit of a PHP moron and can’t figure out how to do it in MT without pulling my hair out! And I’m not so much liking the pricing either. Thanks!
Karen,
Try it out at http://2fargon.com/wordpress/wp-login.php login using “Admin” and “password”
In the new post interface, choose advanced options, and enter something in the Post password field and publish the post.
Now the post will be visible only if you enter the password.
Perfect! That is awesome, thank you!
Chetan-
w.bloggar works now for WP. I’ve used it with MT and WP, and I love it. My only complaint is that it’s slower than posting directly from WP, probably because of the pinging.
Karen-
It’s really easy. When you’re writing a post in WP, just type a password in the password box, and it will be protected. Just use the same password each time, and you’ve got a private blog that only certain people (with the password) can read. No PHP required.
[…] he instructions I used to migrate from Movable Type to WordPress were found on Carthik.net here. This gem of a site was located via Scriptygoddess. And the first place […]
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Wordpress looks pretty good so far, but one thing I *really* want to do is in the category template, I want a list of entries with a brief description, linking to individual entries, as opposed to one long page listing all the entries, if that makes sense. Check out the category pages on screenrant.com to see what I mean.
Thanks,
Vic
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For my own reference… this page has all the links about moving from MT to WP.
Comme […]
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I have tried doing trackbacks to a couple different WordPress blogs, and they don’t seem to work…..I’ve tried using the “trackback URI” given in the comments section under an entry, and I ‘ve trie4d using the http://myblogurl/wp/index.php?p=5 type URL . I see no sign of any trackbacks being recorded or referenced on the site whose entry I referenced. How does one get a trackback recorded on WordPress, and does it work from other blogs such as MT and/ort dotText (a dotnet version…tried it from both)
Dale
PS also, how does one do the multiple blog thing……what are the steps to get there (aside from step 2, from what I gather, is the re-installing of WordPress again…but at what step does the table prefix get set? I understood that prefixing the tables differently allows for the multiple blogs.
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Thanks for the great instructions here.
Re: Keeping your MovableType links. I had some problems doing the 301 redirects. I wrote some php to get the MT Entry Title and search for it in the imported WordPress blog.
Cheers
This seems to be a simple, yet effective solution. Thanks for sharing it here
Yes apparently so, either through comment moderation/apporval by site administration or with a plugin/hack that allows one to setup a blacklist see WP Blacklist Comment SPAM Filteration for more information.
Thank $DEITY for folks with some sense and more knowledge than I :).
google search that brought me here, and several other sites. (hits: 672)
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Thanks for the great instructions! Pop up for comments is very essential, cause this awfull spam is repelling.
Loved the detailed instructions. It helped me a lot.
Thanks so much for the good advice. The link in #3 of importing doesn’t seem to work. Anyplace else I can find that updated import tool?
BTW, what is up with the huge frame taking up 60% of my screen in Camino? Making it very hard to read your good words…
Nevermind, I just downloaded it directly from ScriptyGoddess. Thanks!
Thanks for the heads-up. I have fixed the link to point at her post, instead of the zip file, since she seems to have disabled hotlinking.
[…] to try both these methods. For more help regarding moving from MT to WordPress, refer to the moving guide.
Comments &raq […]
Somethings do not work:I have exported all the post from movable type.
In the main index: www.omegacremona.com/wordpress appears a wrong layout
The rest of the site is ok (example: http://www.omegacremona.com/wordpress/index.php?cat=16)
Why?
Thanks, ita
[…] The layout retains what my wife describes as ‘a serious look’. Related Link: Carthik has some very useful resources for those who want to move from MT to W […]
In terms of first-time installation, WP is much, much easier to install than MT (yet still poorly documented). Here’s something that might help first-timers (like I recently was):
http://www.clearpointsystems.com/ewpi.php
I’m wondering what features MT has that WP doesn’t, or in what ways MT is better. In terms of sheer megabytes and files, MT has about 500 files (5.3Mg) while WP has about 150 files (1.4Mg). Either MT is bloatware, or it has some things WP does not.
I just installed MT myself after using Blosxom before. I did look into using Wordpress, and it’s capital-F Free, which MT isn’t, but MT lets you use the Berkeley DB whereas WP requires MySQL. Which would have cost me an extra 50 quid on my host.
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I switched to wordpress months ago and have found it beats MT hands down. To Yusuf, I’ve heard rumors of a Berkeley DB build in the works but I don’t have any info yet.
Thanks for the heads-up. I have fixed the link to point at her post, instead of the zip file, since she seems to have disabled hotlinking.
wordpress sucks, now I use movable… it’s the best blogging system
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Great info on WP, however I do like how MT “builds” pages, that way google, and other seach engines can actually index my site. with word press index.php is multiple pages, but only gets indexed once. I’m sure there is a hack for “building” pages somewhere.
just my 2 pennies.
ok, I was wrong about how google indexes WP pages. sorry
How to setup Mt Blogs for my webspace. Currently im using Blogger.
Does MT blogs are more useful then blogger? My webspace hosted on Linux. Will it works for PHP?
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You can follow any responses to this entry […]
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some people may also find my article on keeping MT permalinks helpful.
http://blog.art-app.com/archives/2005/12/from_mt_to_wp_using_the_same_permalinks_as_movable_type.html
it involves an SQL Query and the substring function.
Can Anyone help me that how can i add RSS in my blog pages and I am trying to get those to become links. Can any one guide me to be linked with RSS?
Hi Carthik, My name is Chris and my friend Bill Lazar showed me your blog
I read that you have a love for Internet technology and so am writing to you today to let you know about this new internet company I work for - Rawsugar. We have a new topic-based, hierarchical navigation that shows the most relevant topics in a blog at each level of search so your visitors can successively apply topics/tags to narrow results further, finding any post with just a few mouse clicks. It’s easy to use and integrates seamlessly with your site.
Examples of sites which already use this capability include:
- Bill’s Movie Reviews, http://www.billsaysthis.com/movies, which also uses the ‘Save to RawSugar’ link right under each title. Example search:
recommended family comedies.
- Sprol.com, http://www.sprol.com, which is an environmental damage photo blog; the embedded box is at the top right just under the flags. Example
search: industrial disasters.
- Soft-hard, http://www.soft-hard.net/, which is a mature software and digital media site based in Russia.The topics box in both Russian and English, as the person who manages the site uses the same tags in each language to better suit his audience. Example search:
software security utilities.
Incorporating this into a blog is quick and easy:
- Create a free account
- Run a script to make an XML file listing all the blog’s posts with categories used as topics and upload it to our service.
- Go to the Publisher Dashboard, get the JavaScript–some aspects can be customized using options on this screen and for complete control of the appearance we use named CSS styles–and paste it into the blog template.
- As new entries are posted, just tag them using our browser bookmarklet.
Our initial offering is for WordPress blogs, support for MovableType is experimental and other platforms will be added soon.
Try it and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results. We love to help, so let us know if you have any questions or comments.
Thanks for your time and consideration. Regards, Chris
I’m working on an import-mt that will import with entry ids, when I get it done (probably a day or two to test), I’ll post a link over at the wordpress forums. I’ll have both the export needed (I’m going to do it via an index template rather than the mt-export function) and the hacked import-mt. I’ll try to post the link here too, so you can add it to the tuorial, but it will definitely be there if I forget to put it here.
Glad to read such a nice piece of information.
Hi, I solved the task of preserving the links in MT format after moving the MT to WP. It means that you won’t lose any external references to your old posts, but the new posts will have WP’ish nice format. Here’s the post:
http://blog.noizeramp.com/2006/11/02/preserving-links-when-moving-from-movabletype-to-wordpress/
The steps are really simple.
Aleksey
[…] the day Mena announced the new pricing structure for MovableType. A day later, I wrote up a post on how to move from Movable Type to WordPress. Then, and exodus began - with famous users, like Mark Pilgrim, Molly, and so many others shifting […]
[…] the day Mena announced the new pricing structure for MovableType. A day later, I wrote up a post on how to move from Movable Type to WordPress. Then, the exodus began - with famous users, like Mark Pilgrim, Molly, and so many others shifting […]
[…] Type. For example, Carthik Sharma remarked that with Six Apart’s new policies in place, “it’s about time Movable Type users moved to WordPress” and then provided guidelines for bloggers wishing to make the […]