I switched from MovableType to WordPress this week, something I had been putting off for a long time because I had such a highly modified install of MT with a large number of posts & comments. Because mine was a somewhat non-typical install, I had to pull a few tricks to migrate. Here’s a recap, plus links to many of the sources I found useful.
One of my biggest concerns was maintaining my archive URLs. I have some entries that get a lot of hits from searches, so I wanted to maintain those, plus I didn’t want to break any links that I/others might have blogged in the past. (I hate broken links!) 🙂
How I switched from MovableType to WordPress
- Since my MovableType archive URLs had underscores between words, I needed to download and install the WordPress Underscore Permalinks plugin.
- To further match my MovableType permalinks, I set the WordPress permalinks option to the following: /archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
<MTEntries lastn="999999">
Redirect 301 /archives/<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m"$>/<MTEntryTitle dirify="1" trim_to="20">.php http://kevindonahue.com/archives/<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<MTEntryTitle dirify="1">
</MTEntries>
Note: WordPress may have mangled my code, but you get the idea. I used the Redirect 301 setting to tell search engines that the old archive (MT permalink) no longer exists and they should use the new archive (WordPress permalink) from now on. (Read more about .htaccess)
And that’s about it (I think!!) 🙂