Comments on: From MovableType to WordPress in 301 Easy Steps

By: Brandon Savage

Brandon Savage — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:19:31 +0000

Thanks so much for your tutorial! I’m doing this exact process (from a custom solution) and I really appreciate that you took the time to write this out. Thanks!

By: Karl Katzke

Karl Katzke — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:32:54 +0000

Oh, that’s interesting. Thanks for posting all that mangling.

One note of caution: Various plugins will overwrite or alter some of the rewrite rules if you allow them to. Keep a backup of your final file!

By: Dagfinn Reiersøl

Dagfinn Reiersøl — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:57:09 +0000

Interesting. I happen to be working on the same thing, except my old platform is LifeType. I’ve generated a list of redirects by first pulling out all necessary ingredients from both databases using one SQL join and then performing a series of substitues in Vim. I looks like I need only one manual change in addition to get all the posts redirected correctly.

By: maggie

maggie — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:09:55 +0000

Oh, hmm… Good point – looking into it now!

By: Chris Shiflett

Chris Shiflett — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:02:24 +0000

Your feed redirects properly, which is the most important URL to maintain for a blog.

However, it currently redirects twice because of your “broad blanket rules” approach. It might be worth making an exception for that one case.

By: Greg Beaver

Greg Beaver — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:59:39 +0000

Hi Maggie,

You can use a 404 trick to do a search/replace on a URL at maggienelson.com, and use the 301 header inside the 404 script.

Thus, http://maggienelson.com/2006/12/some-trunca.html would cause a 404, triggering your 404 script (let’s pretend it’s 404.php. This script parses out “some-trunca” and searches blog titles, then sends the 301 header.

You could also set up a table mapping blog title to new title or just create a static array from the titles on the old server and put it in your script.

Happy moving :)

Greg