Back To Pressing Word
Yes, it’s happened again :p Once upon an era ago, I used to use MovableType (MT) but I switched to WordPress (WP) when the MovableType license became too restrictive and commercialized. I switched back to MovableType when they opened up the license and at a time when WordPress development was stagnating. And now, to complicate matters even further, I have switched back to WordPress because I hate the "improvements" made to MovableType 4.0 and don’t really want to upgrade to that particular interface/release 🙂
Of course, switching back and forth between blogging applications is never an easy or fun task 🙂 The MT to WP importer included with WP is good enough if all you want is your entries (and perhaps comments, I forget now, I really haven’t used the built-in importer in a long time) transferred over. However, I usually want an exact copy of my current blog transferred over including authors, comments, categories, tags and even blogrolls, if possible 🙂 So, I had to do the work myself.
I had previously written a script to transfer most of the above from MT to WP but when I tried to use the script, I discovered that database changes had left the script behind :p So, I had to sit down and figure out the changes made to both MT and WP table structures all over again. After a couple of hours of work, I had a new script which allowed me to transfer over everything from my existing MT 3.x installation to WP 2.5 🙂 (Yes, I will put the script up for download soon …)
But that’s not all there is to it, right? I had to get my old theme converted over. But I was lucky there because I had originally converted my WP theme over to MT when I switched to MT the last time and I still had the old WP theme. So a few tweaks later, I was ready to go there. But wait … there was more to be done …
I post to my blog using my own offline blogging utility, Blog. So I had to test Blog to make sure that it worked fine with the latest version of WP. And wouldn’t you know it, there was an issue – tagging, which had worked fine under MT, was not working with WP. I had to find the issue and fix it. Then, I had to get all the plugins I wanted, configure them, check that they worked fine and then deploy them.
Finally, all the work is done. And I’m ready to get back to WordPress. So here’s Solipsistic Meanderings once again in WP 🙂
Back To Pressing Word, Part Deux…
Part One is over on Fahim’s site. 😀 Fahim announced to me two days ago that he was thinking of switching back to WordPress since WordPress upgraded to version 2.5 and there were all sorts of new features and……
[…] Part One is over on Fahim’s site. 😀 Fahim announced to me two days ago that he was thinking of switching back to WordPress since WordPress upgraded to version 2.5 and there were all sorts of new features and toys. And he announced when he did since he knew I’ve been meaning to upgrade my MovableType version to 4 and finally, this week, I was going to have the time. All magazine work that I had to do was completed, except for dribs and drabs coming in, so finally, I had breathing room. We took a look at the features in WordPress 2.5 and I decided to make the switch with him. Hey, it’s really not that difficult a choice, ya know? This way, I still get all the tech support I need for whatever might crop up in the future. Plus, if I want some kind of a feature on my blog that isn’t available either with the program itself or with the many available plugins, Fahim says he’ll write it for me. Apparently, it’s much easier for him to do that with WordPress than with MovableType. So yesterday, Fahim converted my database over and I started poking through themes, looking for something that was close enough to what I was looking for that I could modify it further to my exact specifications. 🙂 Maybe later I’ll do something more specific, but gotta start somewhere. And now, we have the result. So the theme is not finished and there’s still some pretty major tweaking to be done, but it’s getting there, and at least it’s mostly presentable. All in all, much easier than tweaking a MovableType 4.0 template to a widgetable state. So there ya go! 🙂 And now I get to test how Blog works and report back to the master with any bugs I find. 😀 […]