As promised, “Elly’s Guide to Moving from Movable Type to Wordpress”. Although it’s probably more of a guide to how not to do it ;) .

Part of the reason I feel the need to write this, rather than just listing the sources I used, is that it actually took me two goes to get this to work. Also, I’ve offered to sort Meri’s Site in the next week or so and could do with a record.

On my first attempt I was trying to get a version of my site working in WordPress separate from my MT site, and then switch the two at the last minute. I installed Wordpress, Imported my MT entries, replaced the wP stylesheet with my own and changed the WP index template so the two played nicely together. So far so good. At this point I decided to publish my new site in in the same directory as my old one, at the same time as setting up MT permalink redirects. This is where it starts to go wrong. MT’s rebuilds every time I get a comment. This is quite often (comment spam is one of the reason’s I’m moving, after all) and means I keep getting confused as to which version of my site I’m looking at. The permalink redirection method I’m using doesn’t actually redirect to the WP default location, so I have to mess around with permalinks. Also, moving the publish directory in Wordpress isn’t anywhere near as easy as I expected it be. Anyway, it’s not long before I get to the point where no only does very little work, but I can’t remember what I did to get it that way. At this point I throw a bit of a tantrum and go and make Syrup Sponge.

Post gluttony, I decide to start over. I download everything that I publish on my site. I reinstall Wordpress, and upload the desired index.php and css file. I make sure I’ve got all my settings the way I want them and I import my old MT entries. Finally I set up permalink redirects, using a method based on the one I linked to before (I’ll write it up later, honest). This means that I now have a fully functioning site, in place of my old one, and it only took me a couple of hours (minus tweaking, which I’m still doing)

So, for anyone who’s interested (and also for external memory’s sake)… Elly’s guide to the MT-WP Switch