With luck I have now switched my blog from Movable Type to WordPress. I had taken a run at this some time ago and then decided that if I waited I could freeload on the work of others who would be making the transition easier, but a few months passed and it’s just as hard.
It’s not hard, it’s just tedious. Particularly getting my old links so they still mostly work. Reproducing my old formating; plus the usual minor upgrading, and getting all the mysql support working in the staging area and in the live site. Just work. I really like PHP My Admin for managing mySQL!
Now I can start discovering all the things that are broken. If you notice anything please leave a comment.
Curiously I discover I have about twenty posts I never actually published but left in draft form.
“Anathema” has changed to “anethema”?
Thanks Bill!
Meanwhile people with the old pages cached can post comments that trigger the movable type to regenerate it’s home page; ouch.
There seems to be a different between LI and li in markup.
I no longer have exactly the same feeds to offer to old subscribers so in some cases I’m redirecting them to a feed in a new format. The RSS/Atom feeds aren’t as verbose, yet, as the old ones.
Can you post, in a few days/weeks, about the main potivations for your decision, and how your assumptions have turned out? Thx.
It appears that there are a mess of configuration settings that aren’t available by browing the admin interface but are available if you discover this page in the Wiki: http://carthik.net/wpdocs/optionsdoc.html
I’ve had a lot of trouble getting my all the old rss and xml feeds I was providing redirected etc. I think they all resolve to something useful now.
I it took a long time to figure out that I needed to set a hidden setting to get the post discriptions to include the entire post.
The feeds are sent with a server header that says text/xml and the rss et. al. feed validator doesn’t like that; fix in the pipeline I think.
The convert from movable type didn’t convert postings that had a thumbnail of an image in them, I’ve not fixed those yet.
All in all this is taking more time than i’d hoped.
To fix a number of broken links to /arch I had to hand patch following the directions outlined here: http://wordpress.org/support/3/6411
The file upload mechanisms are frustrating in the details. This is typical: http://wordpress.org/support/3/5378 but the most frustrating thing – to me – is that the img tag generated doesn’t have width and height attributes. That really slows down the page draw on some browsers.
Changing all my link names broke Google’s model of what to put up for ads on my various pages. Since some of their model is based on incomming lines I wonder if they will build as good a model going forward.