May 10, 2009

Switching Teams: Moveable Type to Wordpress

You probably didn’t notice, but yesterday my handsome web developer Pete switched Say It With Pie from Moveable Type to Wordpress. When I started this blog a couple years ago, I insisted on Moveable Type because it’s what Torontoist publishes on so I was already comfortable with it. But as a general user, I’m enjoying all the easy-to-use functions on the Wordpress interface.

Except for inserting images into posts. Why can I batch upload photos but I can’t batch insert them into a post without turning it into a gallery?

Major changes: a bio page [coming soon!]; a blogroll [coming soon!]; categories [converting!]; a recent comments sidebar; visitors can now register or use their wordpress IDs to post comments; no need to individually approve comments; a “older/newer entries” navigation button at the bottom of the page; improved search functionality.

Also, you will notice a widget in the tiny bio at the top right of the main page. It says something different every time you visit the site. Fun!

Posted by karen | Trackback

Comments: 2 So Far

May 12, 2009 5:03 pm

Ian Wood said:

Link to this comment

How easy was importing entries from MT into WordPress? I’ve been running MT since 2002…might be time to move on…

May 13, 2009 10:35 am

PRQ said:

Link to this comment

It’s easy to do, but difficult to do perfectly. WordPress can import MT’s export file accurately enough, but it has trouble with the line breaks in posts and comments: it doesn’t understand MT’s “convert line breaks” mode, so it replaces a set of two line breaks with just one, mushing all of your paragraphs together.

So I had to write a little script to manually convert line breaks into two <br /> tags for posts. I converted the comments manually, which would probably not be practical if you’ve been running since 2002.

Also, Karen’s MT posts were very straightforward (no categories, tags, or such), so there may exist some issues that we just didn’t come across.

In any case, you’ll definitely want to set up a test WP installation, and play around with the export-import process to see how it works for you.

Post a Comment