Recently in wordpress Category

Mark Carey has released a very interesting plugin for MovableType that emulates the Wordpress interface for authors.

Screenshots and demo are available on his site.

I only played with the demo for a couple of minutes and was amazed at how well it worked!

Nice work!

Byrne Reese has released a basic plugin for MovableType that implements "pingback".

You can download the code via svn from here:
http://code.sixapart.com/svn/mtplugins/trunk/PingBack/

If you're working from the command line:
svn co http://code.sixapart.com/svn/mtplugins/trunk/PingBack/

I'd recommend actually reading the README files :)

More info on his blog

The other day Byrne released a plugin so that MovableType users could allow Wordpress.com users authenticate to make comments.

That was impressive.

Seeing a Wordpress logo on a MT install you'd have to stop for a moment to wonder if your eyes were deceiving you.

In any case Byrne's plugin works very well and now there's another one which is for AOL / AIM users.

This kind of stuff is what makes Movable Type so cool.

Whether you want to make a minor change to your site's mappings or have moved a well indexed site from another platform to MT, you will run into niggly issues with 404s at some point.

While it's relatively easy to catch some of them ie. the most popular pages on your site for example, it's painful trying to work out exactly what everyone is trying to see. It doesn't matter which software you use to parse your server logs - you'll still end up with a lot of unusable data that will take hours to plough through.

Enter Clean Sweep.

Clean Sweep's sole purpose in life is to catch 404s. Not only does it log them in an easy to read format, including how many hits there are and when the last one was, but it also offers you a lot of control over the 404s themselves.

In order to use CleanSweep you will need to have some level of access to your Apache config OR you might be able to get it to work via .htaccess. I haven't tried via .htaccess, so I cannot confirm if that method will work or not.

First off you will need to get your hands on the code. As the plugin is still "in development" the only way you'll be able to access it is using SVN, which is a very popular version control system. Don't let the term "version control" scare you. I wouldn't know where to begin with SVN, but I do know how to "check out" (ie. download) code from an SVN repository. I'm sure you will be able to work that much out too!

Once you have the code install the plugin as normal.

When you login to MT again you will be presented with an upgrade screen, as the plugin needs to create a new database table to store its data.

As the plugin description goes:

• Clean Sweep is a plugin that helps administrators manage broken links on their blog, automatically correct the error if possible and then generate mod_rewrite rules to help correct the problem permanently.*

To do that you need to add a small bit of code to your Apache config to use CleanSweep to handle all the 404s from the plugins config screen.

You can also set a custom page to act as your 404 error page, maybe adding some text for human visitors telling them that the page has moved etc.,

Once you have everything configured wait a couple of hours (or less depending on how busy your site is) and then visit the new 404s page from the "Manage" dropdown menu.

You'll see a simple page with the 404s, the number of requests for each one, time of the last request and two options: "map" and "reset"

The "map" option is the one we are most interested in, as this allows to handle the redirection of both human and computer visitors

Find the new location of the entry or page in your site and then open up the "map" screen. You will be able to set the new location for each page that is causing a 404.

Once you are finished setting up your mappings for each 404 error click the "Generate Rewrite Rules" link and you will be given a nice little set of rewrite rules that you can add to your Apache config OR .htaccess file.

The plugin is really handy. I've been using it since early this morning and so far it's redirected several hundred visitors that I would have lost otherwise.

Of course it will also make you aware of some of the junk that is trying to get in to your site, as you will see lots of dodgy requests for pages that you really don't want people to access!

I decided to make the move from Wordpress to MovableType some time ago after I saw the features that MT4 was introducing.

While moving a few entries (less than 200) may not be that daunting of a task, when you go to move a site with close to two thousand (or more) it's a completely different matter.

Apart from the functionality aspects that may or may not be available via plugins and core functions, the key issue is preserving your URL structure as closely as possible. There are a lot of reasons why this makes sense. A quick glance at my server logs show me that most of the traffic to my personal blog is to older articles that are still popular years after I wrote them. I cannot control who has linked to them!
While it may be possible to reconstruct a URL mapping using a complex set of mod_rewrite rules this is hardly advisable or particularly attractive.

The URLs of primary interest are those pointing to individual entries.

By default Movable Type 4 includes a number of mappings that you can select in your site's configuration. However there is no reason why you can't construct your own, as the system will happily support a custom mapping. For a list of configuration variables have a look at the documentation on the site.

There are two stages to the migration:

   1. Export
   2. Import

From within wordpress (wp-admin/) go to manage > export and take a dump of all your entries.

This will also include all comments and most of your categories.
If you have extra content that is being provided by any of the Wordpress plugins this will NOT be included.

In theory the export file is XML, however it's not valid XML in many cases as Wordpress doesn't seem to encode a lot of extended characters correctly and spits them back out in the HTML format again. While a browser may not have issues displaying this form of character the XML based importer provided by MT might choke.

The solution, unfortunately, is to do some post export data massaging ie. force the "XML" to validate as XML.

In my case, as I use linux, I was able to run it through an XML validator called xml-starlet. Whichever validation tool you use the process will be the same. You basically have to replace any "weird" or non-compliant characters with ones that are valid in XML.

Once the file validates as XML it will be ready for import - almost.

First off you need to make a few minor tweaks to the way MT handles the URLs

The default setting is to take the first X characters from your post's basename and use that as the constructor for the permalink. If you've been using Wordpress for some time you can easily have post entries with very long basenames, so you need to increase the number of characters.

To do this login to MT and go Preferences > Blog Settings > Entries and increase the value of "basename length"

The other thing you'll need to sort out is how you are going to actually map the URLs.

By default Wordpress uses hyphens to replace spaces, so your old blog would have contained lots of urls similar to this:

something-is-very-long

In Movable Type you have a lot more flexibility in how you want to display the URLs, but you probably want to preserve the older mappings.

Go to Design > Templates > Archive Templates and click on the "Entry" template.

Towards the bottom of the screen you should see a section called "Archive Mapping". It comes with twelve popular mappings already configured ie. how you convert an entry into a URL.

So, for example, you might want to display the entry as:

category/sub_category/entry_basename.html

Which would give you something like:

/coolblogs/movabletype/i_like_cake.html

Of course this is movable type, so you can also choose to do up your own mapping. In my case I had to get something that would do this kind of thing for me:

/blog/archives/2007/08/29/irish-mac-users-cant-have-fun/

The blog's root is in /blog , but I wanted all archived entries built out into a sub-directory. Why? Because I set it up that way a long time ago and moving the URLs would be painful!

So the next two bits are the year, then the month, then the day, then the post entry with a trailing slash - so I end up with an index page for each one.

So tweak you mappings to suit your orginal Wordpress mappings. If one of the default sets isn't suitable you can contruct your own using the tags / options available at:
http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/archive-file-path-specifiers.html


You can now proceed to the import.

Go to System Overview > Tools > Import

The "blog to import" is the blog where you are going to be sending the data ie. your blog's new home. If you haven't got that setup already you will need to do so before proceeding.

"Importing from" - self-explanatory options
You can also choose who the articles / posts are imported as. In my case I'm quite happy to import them all as me, as I don't have multiple authors.

You can also specify where the uploads are set to, however from my own testing this doesn't make much of a difference. Your best bet is to create a directory structure including wp-content/uploads/ as you would have had previously and move all the subdirectories and files from your old wordpress blog into it. This will ensure that all the paths etc., for images in posts and the handling of "assets" in MovableType is handled correctly.

You can now start the import.

For smaller blogs the import file will simply upload using the form and start working, but with a larger import ie. several megabytes of XML code the upload can take some time. (On a sidenote I would hope that future versions of MT allow for other upload options as uploading large files over HTTTP is anything but ideal).

If the upload and import is successful you will get a nice "all done" type message when it's finished.

You may need to do some rejigging of formatting etc., in your posts, as there is a difference in how the two backends handle the user text input, but if it all looks relatively "sane" then you *should*, in theory, be ready to publish.

Of course this covers the migration of the content. I have already touched on some of the functionality in previous posts and will be talking some more in the future.

If you import from a Wordpress install into Movabletype you may notice that your "pages" seem to have vanished.

They haven't, though they're no longer anywhere useful.

By default the pages you had in WP will have been pulled in as posts / articles into Movable Type.

I'm not sure what the best way of handling them post-import, but at least they are in the system.

If you're moving from Wordpress to Movabletype one of the issues you may run into is with your feeds. If you've been using the now official feedburner plugin you will need to update your Feedburner account.

Whether you are using a plugin or a simple .htaccess hack to redirect people from rss.xml and atom.xml to FeedBurner don't forget to update the RSS source!