Migration to WordPress - Farewell Movable Type
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You might have noticed a new look to Renegade Sanctuary today, or even during the weekend. For years, I’ve used Movable Type as my blogging system of choice, but as time moved on and my needs changed I found myself increasingly limited by what I could do with my MT blog with the limited time I had.
Now this has nothing to do with skill, because I know I could have learned what I needed to get Renegade Sanctuary were I wanted. No, it was a matter of what I wanted to spend my time doing. Instead of tinkering with the blog, I’d rather be writing, and with this in mind I decided to make the leap to WordPress.
With the wealth of themes, plugins, and other extensible functions and design elements, I could easily change my blog with little effort. Compare that with the near Herculean effort of finding any sort of theme or design for Movable Type and you can see the appeal.
It took a little work during the weekend (and some help from great friends on Plurk. Hello Allan!) to migrate everything, but thankfully with the use of my blogging software, Ecto, I was able to quickly restore my old entries from MT to Wordpress in only a couple of clicks. I looked around for a couple of themes and decided on a couple of them, starting with Chris Pearson’s NeoClassical. A very nice and clean theme which I plan to build on by switching out the default images and adding a couple of more widgets.
Since I’m still new to Wordpress, if there are some plugins or widgets you’d recommend I use, please feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll look into it.
So, without further discussion, I’m off to continue writing. Keep an eye out here for new features, content and for details on a new writing project I’m working on involving social media and fiction.
Talk to all of you later!
4 comments
Here’s a list of plugins that I use on every site:
* Akismet
* WordPress Stats
* Favicon Manager
* Google XML Sitemaps
* Semilogic’s Google Analytics
* Subscribe to Comments
* “What would seth godin do?”
* Gravatar
* WP Super Cache
And if you use FeedBurner, you’ll need:
* FeedSmith
* FlareSmith
Most are found on the Plugins Database on wordpress.org - Others you’ll need to google for.
I’ve actually installed both FeedSmith and FlareSmith, and so far they look to be working (I believe).
And some of the others I’ve put up too. But thank you for the list of others, I’ll check them out and add them to the mix. One thing though, do most of those work with 2.6?
Hi,
I just came across your post and I ma on the verge of switching to wordpress too. The thought scares me because I fear losing years of entries.
I am tired of spending countless hours tweaking and finding fixes for MT 4.12.
Would you be so kind as to tell me some tips? IE: your server host, version, etc.
I have had problems with yahoo and I am leaving their hosting as well for Blue Host.
Thanks, Joe
Well, I wouldn’t recommend my host, in fact I’m looking at switching to one of the major ones out there (AN Hosting, Blue Host, DreamHost, etc) when it comes time for me to renew next May.
From what I have heard as far as Blue Host you should be fine. Also, as far as loosing entries, there are migration utilities within WP that will move those entries over with relatively little pain.
Another route, if you use a Mac, would be to use a program like Ecto. Ecto is an off-line blogging software like Windows Live Writer where you can write your blog entries and the publish them to your server. For my migration, I simply re-pointed the software to the new server and hit publish and they were up again.
Now, I won’t deny you’ll be doing some clean up afterwards in categories, missing images, and what not, but it was relatively painless considering the alternative.
Of course, the only reason I performed the above method was that my host only lets me have one database and I could not use the migration utility withing WP. If your host allows you to create more than one database (or in your case you’re going to another host) then install WP and let it migrate the entries for you.
I hope that helps!
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