I just read an article on Problogger about a fellows bad experience moving from Movable Type to Wordpress. The problem was not the data move but the names of the posts.

Last fall I moved nearly all of my blogs from Movable Type to Wordpress and it did go fairly smoothly although I did have a bit of a problem and have some ideas on making the process easier. Here are the steps.

Create a new folder for your new blog and create the wordpress blog

In this step you will just be going and creating the title of the blog and the permalink structure that you have on the old blog. Thei mportance of this is that when people go from the old location to the new location you do not want anything to break. Google is not very smart for finding your new post names when you break the permalink structure.

The other thing that may happen is that you may be moving a blog from one domain name to another, in this case you will be doing a 301 redirect so that people and search engines and incoming links can still find your content even with a new name of your domain. I did exactly this with three of my blogs.

Export all entries from Movable Type to a text file

This did not go smoothly for me. Apparently my 600 entries were just to much for my mysql settings and the export file was timing out half way though exporting my blog, so I just exported a few entries at a time and then appended them together and saved the file as one big file.

Import to wordpress

Now I imported that text file into wordpress. At this point my readers and Google do not know that I have moved my blog and do not see it yet as I used a new installation in a new folder in step 1 and now I can look through and compare all of the files and make sure that the permalinks are correct, change them if they are not. See all of the comments are there (mine came but links within them were broken, still worked fine though). And I now built all of the things that I wanted in my new Wordpress blog, sidebar widegets and links, ads, new header.

There was no hurry except I could not post in the middle. If I posted to the old blog it would not show up in the new and the world did not kow about the new blog yet.

Change domain forward or 301

This is the most irritating part technically I think. On the blogs that I was changing the domain on I would actually leave the old blog live and set up a 301 redirect in the root of that old folder, this way all traffic would move to my new blog. In any cases were there was a problem with the permalinks, if the old Movable Type was not linking to the new Wordpress because of dashes in the title or something then I could just do this 301for the individual post.

For moving a blog with the same domain from Movable Type to Wordpress I just had to change the folder that the domain pointed to from within my hosts control panel.

Moving a blog is a bit of a long winded process but is not as difficult as it just is a lot of steps. Before you make the move give yourself some time to do a bit of research and to map out all of your steps so that you know where to go back to if something does not work and so that everything goes smoothly without you breaking your blog.

Any by the way I love all of my new wordpress blogs better then my old Movable Type.

Here are some additional resources

5 Steps to redirecting traffic from old to new blogs

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