inluminent

In the past 24 hours, I’ve done quite a bit with the server move… I’ll try to document the actual steps I went through at some point, so that someone else moving from MT to WP can sort of follow my steps (hopefully they’ll plan it out a little better) if they want to.

Basically, this is what I did:

1. Set up a new site with DreamHost.
2. One-click installed WordPress from DreamHost’s nifty one-click application interface.
3. Exported my old MT data on the old server
4. Finished installing WordPress on the new server
5. Imported all old MT entries into WP.
6. Set up permalinks in WP with the cruft-free architecture I like.
7. Changed my MT archive templates, so they have redirect code in them for each archive type to point to the new WP url structure, as much as possible (MT dirify uses “_” instead of “-” to seperate words, so that sort of sucked).
8. Rebuilt all old MT archives and downloaded to my Powerbook
9. Used BBEdit’s powerful find and replace to batch find “_” and replace with “-”
10. Uploaded all old pages at /weblog/archives/ so that old files are in the right place to redirect people to new urls
11. Added a few lines to my .htaccess file, so that the old files work (I was using .htaccess to remove the .php from the end of those old urls).
12. Modified the WP templates a little to add the Google AdSense Code (will do more modifying later, to tweak the templates and styles exactly how I want them.
13. Installed WP Hashcash, a most excellennt plugin that Paul Beard recommended to kill comment spam in it’s tracks.

Overall, I’m more than pleased with WordPress, and am not looking back on Movable Type for a while… I just want to be an end-user folks… and with WP, I can be that end-user. It also helps that I know a little about PHP, and not a damned thing about PERL.