The time has come to move the goods over to a new content management system and I am looking at either Textpattern or WordPress. The only problem is I have always been reluctant to make the move for FG because there is so much going on I am not sure of how feasible making the move would be.
This is where I ask for your help. If there are any Textpattern or WordPress professionals out there who are familiar with the import abilities of each system then I would greatly appreciate your help. Here is what is in involved with the FG setup:
- Permalinks: Would either have to stay the same or be able to redirect to the new pages. Prefer to keep them the same, but understand that neither package may ship with underscores in filenames by default.
- Extended entries Not everything within an entry gets posted on the homepage and for those article we need the ability to have it say “continue reading…” which requires an extended entry field.
- Strong import capabilities We have over 1673 entries, 6370 comments and 23 authors that would need to make the jump along with a number of templates, but I am thinking the template part might have to be done manually.
Why Make The Change?
I have been using WordPress for many of my new sites and 9rules has a kickass CTO who is amazing with PHP so moving to a PHP system only makes sense. And things just happen a little bit faster in the backend when you are making changes when working with a dynamic publishing system. I understand that MT now has some dynamic capabilities, but it’s also a Perl based system which I am not going to touch.
If there are other alternatives (has to be Open Source) that you can think of that would be easier to make the move with than either WordPress or Textpattern then by all means let me know.
Speaking on the subject of Permalinks and Extended Entries:
You can set up the permalink structure just about any way you want to in WordPress. Should be easy to set it up as /category/post-title.
WordPress has a field labeled excerpt, and you can use this to tease an article, then link to the full text. Works similar to the Entry and Extended Entry functions that we have here on FP now using MT.
As for the import capabilities, I can not say for sure. Check out this page in the WP Codex Wiki:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_from_Movable_Type_to_WordPress
That should cover the basics. Since you are dealing with lots of entries, check this out also:
http://wordlog.com/archives/2004/07/29/importing-large-movabletype-text-files/
If anything, you could always try to get in touch with Matt and see if he had any tips to offer. Check out the WP support forums as well.
Sorry, I meant to link those URLs.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_from_Movable_Type_to_WordPress
http://wordlog.com/archives/2004/07/29/importing-large-movabletype-text-files/
Underscore permalinks plugin for wordpress
http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Underscore_Permalinks
I use the ‘excerpt reloaded’ plugin to just show sections of a post
http://guff.szub.net/the-excerpt-reloaded
You specify the number of letters and it cuts things off at the end of the nearest word at that length.
The ability to add excerpts is pretty easy without the plugin (more info here http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_excerpt) but I like the extra functionality the plugin gives me.
AFAIK you can import things easily, I doubt templates will be so straight forward, but they aren’t hard to do.
But homepage isn’t excerpt, they are introduction paragraphs and the rest gets put into the extended entry field.
So what gets put on the homepage? Is it ‘X’ amount of letters/words? First paragraph? What?
Whatever gets put into the ‘Body’ field.
When I imported my MT blog entries into WordPress, it imported all extended entries correctly. As someone said above, you should be able to manipulate the permalink format however you wish.
Perhaps you could do a small test run with a subset of the entries?
I’ve been porting from MT to WP for all my sites and had no problem importing posts and comments from MT. The WP doc is pretty good on covering that subject.
The trick with WP permalinks is that while MT uses “_” to separate words, WP uses “-”, but there’s a plugin or two to deal with that.
http://www.orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress_underscore_plugin/
As long as you keep the directory structure the same, I think all will be well.
You can use to break up entries easily. A site with the numbers you mentioned should be no problem for the importer, the last one I did personally had over 65k comments. Ideally you could have the old underscore URIs redirect to the new hyphened ones, since hypens perform better in search engines anyway.
Hey Scrivs,
I can help you with the move to WP If you like. My site (r0x0rz.info) is set up like the old FG. I can convert this template to WP If you like, and the “Visit Site” url is quite easy to add to your post with a plugin. Let me know dude. Check my site out. See the old design? It was converted by James W. and the 9rules WhiteSpace design, I converted it to WP but then deleted (I wanted to see If it would look sexy, which It did).
Let me know. I can help you with the underscore permalinks, etc..:).
I have a feeling that all of this stuff can also be done with Textpattern. Since neither program is exactly the same as MT, you will have to use “plugins/hacks”, anyways.
Textpattern uses “-” by default but I’m sure there is a way to use “_”. Also, TXP has a MT importer. The “extended entries” part will have to be dealt with the same way- either “exerpt/body” or “body + plugin”.
http://www.textpattern.org might be a good place to check stuff out.
All the help you need should be at http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_From_Movable_Type_to_WordPress . Should you need additional help, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Well since most of the technicalities have been pointed out already, I’d just like to say that TXP looks pretty and all, but WordPress is better developed. You’ll definitely find more (core and plugin) features and documentation.