My Experiences Of Moving from Movable Type to Wordpress 2.0 at DiscoMoose

My Experiences Of Moving from Movable Type to Wordpress 2.0

Published 3 years, 5 months ago in Blogs and Wordpress

Until recently, I’d been using Movable Type to operate a music news website, however I’d installed Wordpress 2.0 elsewhere and had it impressed me with how pleasant and satisfying it is to use. What also impressed me was the Wordpress theme, k2, which is by the same designer as the infamous (and now Wordpress default) Kubrick theme. Although still in beta, k2 is clean and functional; it is lovely to look at and to use.

So I’d made up my mind - I was going to “upgrade” that site from Movable Type 3.2 to Wordpress 2.0 (and I intend to do the same with a couple of other websites I had operating on that MT installation. Google led me to a page in the Wordpress documentation: Importing from Movable Type to WordPress, which looked like it would tell me exactly what I needed to know in the form of a step-by-step guide. By reading that, I learnt that the biggest issue when converting is that of trying to preserve the permanent links, since Wordpress and MT each use slightly different structures.

I followed the guide through the exporting from MT stages and had no problems doing so. When I reached the section on importing the entries to Wordpress, I noticed that the guide was significantly out of date. It gives instructions to upload the text file of exported entries which MT generates to your server using FTP, then edit and manually navigate a file called import-mt.php. I’m using Wordpress 2.0 and I couldn’t find this file where it was supposed to be. Instead I found that the process had been improved vastly since that guide was written.

Once you save the textfile of exported entries generated by MT, you can login to the Site Admin section of your Wordpress blog and you will find that the rightmost item in the main menu is entitled Import. Clicking on that leads to a screen with various choices of file to import, which includes Movable Type. Then you are asked to choose the text file that MT generated using a file input box. A little CHMODing and some options about the import later, I had the articles in my blog and I was ready to set up the redirection of the old articles to their new Wordpress locations.

For this I used Alex King’s solution as suggested by the Wordpress Guide: Movable Type template for individual entries, which provides templates for Movable Type which simply work out what the new URL will be and redirect the user accordingly. This worked almost perfectly for the individual articles, but that’s all it handles.

It was then that I noticed the first major problem: I could no longer log into the Wordpress Site Admin section, infact I couldn’t recover my password either! When importing articles, Wordpress had prompted me to enter author names or to select a user on this blog to assign the articles to. I wanted them to be assigned to me and there were two seperate selection boxes so I selected my admin username from the drop down menus in both and assumed that all would work ok. What actually happened was that Wordpress then seemed to create another user with the username admin, but no email address or other details assigned. I was locked out!

My solution to that problem was to manually edit the database, using phpMyAdmin provided by my web host, and delete the extra admin. That didn’t fix my problem so after a minute or two of panicking I decided to login to the FTP and clear the contents of the Wordpress cache folder: /wp-content/cache and from that point it was working properly. I dont think that this extra user was because of a Wordpress bug but instead by something I’d done (maybe I can blame poor usability for that though).

Another issue I came across was that of setting up redirects for things which Alex King’s individual entry templates did not cover. And I failed trying to do this but I have no idea why.

mod_rewrite has always been a strange beast to me. I have, once or twice, managed to tame it but 99% of the time I can’t, and this was one of those times - even though I was copying and pasting code from the Wordpress site. I was trying to set up a redirect to point users asking for Movable Type’s RSS feeds towards the new Wordpress ones, but for some reason nothing I did would work properly and I always ended up with a Wordpress 404 page. I gave up on this one; it was not a big blog, and the majority of my readers wouldn’t know what RSS so it’s not of particular importance. There are also other URLs which weren’t set up to redirect, for example the MT category and date archives, though again I decided that they weren’t important enough to try and fail to establish redirects myself.

The last “problem” that I had was that none of the old comments on my articles were present in Wordpress after converting. There were only four of these though and two were spam so again, not a problem for me.

If you’re reading this article thinking “Will I bother converting to Wordpress?” then I’d say, definately, to go for it. Wordpress is an excellent application and will soon make up for any issues encountered with the transition. A lot of the problems that I had were perhaps my fault, but they didn’t effect me because the blog in question isn’t a very popular or particularly large blog, so I was able to disregard many issues. If that doesn’t sound like your blog, then I’d suggest you read the documentation a lot more thoroughly and take your time at every step to ensure that it’s done right.

As I mentioned above, I also plan to convert a couple of other MT powered websites to Wordpress so I’ll report back if the experience is any better - or worse - the second time around.

Update: 24 Jan 2006 - Moving another blog
I’ve just managed to move another blog from Movable Type to Wordpress and it went much better than the last time. There was no problem with an extra admin user being added, and I figured out how to redirect the feeds from the Movable Type blog to the Wordpress one using .htaccess. The only problem this time is that the comments still don’t appear to have imported correctly - even though the list of imported posts mentioned comments next to the post names.

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14 Responses to “My Experiences Of Moving from Movable Type to Wordpress 2.0”

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1 ../Ant Feb 9th, 2006 at 9:43 pm

Heya, glad you came right I am struggling, what is CHMOD and why did you need to use it? I am getting this error:
—————————————————–
Warning: file(C:Program FilesApache GroupApache2htdocswordpress/wp-content/uploads/2006/02/import.txt11) [function.file]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs\wordpress\wp-admin\import\mt.php on line 78

Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Bad arguments. in C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs\wordpress\wp-admin\import\mt.php on line 79

All done. Have fun!
—————————————————–

Any ideas?
2 Steven Feb 12th, 2006 at 4:43 pm

CHMOD is a command which sets permissions on a file, so you can use it to allow the web server to write to a file or directory. Most FTP clients will allow you to change the attributes of a file using CHMOD - I’m not sure if that’s what’s happening here though, since your site appears to be hosted on a Windows server and I don’t know how permissions work with those.

One possibility is that the folder wp-content couldn’t be written to properly, so you might have to check in to setting permissions on Windows servers - a workaround may be to FTP the file import.txt to wp-content/uploads/2006/02/ and then try to run the installer entering that file again (then if it can’t upload the file then it should still be where it expects). Another thing you should probably check is the wordpress settings to see if the paths to wordpress are entered correctly (I say this as the first line of your error seems to be missing a few forward slashes, /).

Good luck with it.
3 j Apr 8th, 2006 at 11:03 am

hello
i got a similar problem but i am not sure whether it’s caused by the chmod problem.

i have got:
Unable to create directory /home/~/~/wp-content/uploads/2006/04. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

do u think i need to set special permission to any directory?

thks a lot
j
4 Steven Apr 9th, 2006 at 5:02 pm

j,
Try using chmod to change the permissions of the wp-content directory to 666 or, if it still doesn’t work, 777.
5 Soosan Apr 28th, 2006 at 7:49 pm

Thank you so much for writing about your experiences in moving to WP. It was extremely helpful in moving my blog.
6 Chris May 30th, 2006 at 5:31 pm

Hi, I’m working on a project where the old site used moveable tpye/typepad, I’ve posted a couple of questions recently to a number of wp forums and mailng lists. I have an “archive” of all of the old site’s moveable type/typepad “html” files (all posts, comments, archives, articles, etc) I have created a set of scripts to convert these html files to a “friendly” html format, and a set of scripts to extract all the data i need to move it over to WP (author, post date, post title, body of post, each comment, comment author, comment author’s email, etc) I’ve been trying to track down some information on the format for the MT/TP “import” file, so that I can just have my scripts write the extracted data to the import file format compatible with the existing WP “mt-import” script. I haven’t had much luck, so, if anyone has either

a) any documentation on the format for the “import” file created when you do a MT “export’ or knows where it exists that would be a big help

or

b) if one of you who has already been through this process could send me a small sample or entire “import.txt” file zipped up, that would be perfect, I just need to examine the exact format of the txt file so I can get my “extract” scripts to create a set of these “import’ files for me rather than try to write the extracted data directly to the WP database which would be my last resort.

the site I’m working with contains over 11,000 posts/archive html files, so the first problem is that the export process for that many posts isn’t working correctly, and the second issue is that the previous “webmaster”, isn’t being very co-operative with trying to create the export files, so I did a “site grab” of all of the posts, etc, created the scripts, and am pretty much ready to go except for the correct format of the export file.

thanks..chris
7 rajesh Nov 13th, 2006 at 9:25 am

Hi,

I am trying to get a new blog designed for my business site and the team doing it has suggested MT. We will NOT be using a template and the design is being done afreash by the team. The question really is, should I go with MT and why are people moving from MT to Wordpress? What is the basic need to do so?

Do advise.

R
8 Lauren Nov 27th, 2006 at 1:39 pm

nice piece of information you have here.. Thanks for it… I am also interested not to move but to have a website istalled on WP 2.0… any way nice transition
9 author Jun 23rd, 2007 at 7:27 pm

nice
10 Conservatories Mar 27th, 2009 at 6:29 am

In my one website i have same problem: “Unable to create directory /home/username/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2009/01. Is its parent directory writable by the server?”

These type of error you can solve by below steps as per my experience

- First pass 777 permission to WP-content & also too upload folder and its sub folder
- Then moves to your admin section where you can find setting option, in this section check “Miscellaneous’ for uploading path ( This is the main problem please check it again)
- After this please create folder which are mention in your error. as per above mention error i have to create “2009? and also a subfolder with name “01?
- Now try to upload image…

Best Luck!!