July 5, 2006

Moving the type …

Yes, as some of you might have noticed already, I’m back to using MovableType πŸ™‚ There is less server load, in certain ways it’s much more configurable and (as I keep saying) I do like their anti-spam options much more than I like the WordPress solutions. Sure, there are downsides. I can’t have dynamic stuff like calendars which show the current date :p But overall, I think this is a better solution to go with.

The changeover itself was fairly easy. It took me about a day to modify my old script for moving data from Movable Type to WordPress and to convert it to move data from WordPress to MovableType πŸ™‚ The testing took a bit longer and I had to do some rewriting as I discovered issues. Somewhere along the way, I also found out about MovableType 3.3 beta and had to again adapt the script for the single relevant database change that I found there. I have put up the scripts here if anybody wants to use them.

Of course, once the data was transferred over safely from WordPress, I had to re-do the templates that I used on my site and the creation and tweaking of templates took about another day. Was I ready for posting after that? Oh, no :p I now had to test posting with Blog to see that I could post from my desktop to my new MT based blog using Blog. This resulted in further code changes. Not because Blog wouldn’t publish to MT but due to a curious problem which arose due to this particular set of circumstances.

Blog keeps track of what entries have been published to a remote server. I had already published the entries for my WordPress based blog. But the MT blog has different entry IDs than the WP blog did. So I couldn’t simply switch remote blogs. I could have wiped everything on the server and published all the entries from my desktop via Blog to generate new entry IDs but then I would have lost the comments on the server since Blog doesn’t track comments when publishing via XMLRPC (mostly because none of the APIs provide a way to download comments). So, I had to add new functionality to Blog which would allow me to synchronize existing entries with those on a remote server. Adding that functionality and testing it took some more time.

Now, I’m finally ready to post to the blog again using Blog :p So let’s see how this one goes …

Tags: Blog, Blogging, Coding, MovableType, Site
Posted by Fahim at 6:33 am   Comments (2)

2 Responses to Moving the type …

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#1
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Wayfarer 07 July 2006 at 6:40 am

Hmmmm

Does that mean that we’ll soon have another beta version released? πŸ˜† πŸ˜‰

Oh, well, I personally prefer WordPress just because it’s Open Source. In fact, I’m planning to migrate all my posts in Blog to WP… ¿Any db script available for that? πŸ˜‰

Regards,

— Wayfarer

#2
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Fahim 07 July 2006 at 8:25 am

That’s the reason I switched to WordPress in the first place too but Open Source only takes you so far if they don’t really add any useful features :p The WordPress developers seem to be stuck way up there in the stratosphere with their intellectual discussions about semantic publishing and so on and not really working on adding new features that users actually want. They were promising the multiple blog feature way back in WP 1.2 and then dropped that and said that their priorities had shifted. They don’t have any real tagging support and that has become important to me too. So, I’d rather go with a platform which caters to the users rather than intellectuals :p

As for migrating posts to WP from Blog, you are aware that Blog 8.0 beta 5 posts directly to WP and that you can simply set up a WP blog and publish all your entries to that blog from within Blog, right? πŸ™‚

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