From the Orient

Well that was relatively painless. The import was simple and easy, getting the permalinks correct was a little bit more tricky, but only took a couple of hours. If it wasn’t for the “dash-to_underscore change”:http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2004/04/18/smart-urls-converting-from-mt-to-wp-and-die-url-die/ I’d have been done a long time ago.

So, things I did and tried to get into order. Firstly, I started with “these conversion instructions here”:http://blog.carthik.net/vault/2004/05/14/movabletype-to-wordpress/ and from “a link here about slugs”:http://www.libraryplanet.com/2004/05/slugs, I used the “mt import keyword slug importer script”:http://www.carthik.net/wpdocs/import-mt-keywords-postslug.phps which worked without problem.

A little mod_rewrite to redirect the various RSS(ish) feeds (RSS 0.91,RDF and Atom) to the wp versions and the only problem was that before 2004 I didn’t use a keyword for entries, but was using MTEntryTitle with underscores, and WordPress uses dashes.

I tried a few things; “this looked the best option”:http://idly.org/2004/05/13/fixing-mt-urls-for-wp and it worked perfectly, but I started getting some odd PHP errors about headers. I can see the problem, but not knowing PHP, I can’t see a solution. Next I tried “a method from the wiki”:http://wiki.wordpress.org/index.php/MT-Redirect which wrote a custom .htaccess code. I didn’t like this as it generated some 700 lines for the server to parse. However, it didn’t work anyway. This was because I wasn’t using the archive directory, so my URL is 2004/01/01/some-title and when some_title was entered, none of the redirect rules were listened to because a different rewrite rule was sending the request to the wordpress index.php file. “This method”:http://wordpress.org/development/archives/2004/03/29/redirecting-mt-entries/ had the same problem as above.

So in the end, I went through my referer logs and simply changed any linked post to have underscores. I know this is going to miss some things, but it is a short term solution until I can have a look and figure out whether the header problem with the plugin is a known problem, or I can fix it. (It is 1am now and I’m going to bed).

I’ve decided to do a new design, so I’m not changing any of the templates yet, I’ve got the default Wordpress templates atm. The blogroll and linklog can come tomorrow.

Anyway, it seems that “SixApart have been doing some thinking and have gone someway to resolve the problems with the licensing”:http://www.sixapart.com/log/2004/05/movable_type_30.shtml#more.

bq. The single CPU usage statement was not intended to be in the license. It has been struck from the license, and everyone who has downloaded Movable Type 3.0 thus far can officially consider this change retroactive.

Oops! Schoolboy error.

bq. To be clear, sub-weblogs that make up weblog sites shouldn’t be counted toward your weblog total.

Should have been clear from the start. Either SixApart had no idea how their users used their software, or they just didn’t think about it, which if you are going to base a licensing structure on the number of weblogs is very silly indeed.

bq. We’re adding a new “Personal Edition Add-On” package that gives someone who has purchased a Personal Edition license the ability to buy 1 new weblog and 1 new author for $10. You can purchase as many additional author/weblog packs as you want, each for $10.

This is a clear case where they have listened to valid criticism and done well to address it. Still overpriced, but that is for up to them to work out. I get the impression of a young company not really knowing what they are doing. Growing too big, too soon? Or just not enough business knowledge? I mean, I wouldn’t have a clue about how much to change, and how many hackers would? That’s a boring job for some suit to work out. I’m off to learn a little bit about PHP (ssh Aquarius, it won’t be permanent).

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2004 at 1:14 and is filed under Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.