Having recently moved from CityDesk to Movable Type, I captured some notes on the technique I used to move my weblog entries over.
In summary, I created a CityDesk template to dump all articles into a text file, then imported it into Movable Type. The text file needs to be in accordance with the import file format.
Create the CityDesk template using these steps:
- Create a new HTML file at the root level, naming it 'export.txt' (see below for an example)
- Publish (or preview) the CityDesk site
- Grab the export.txt file and review it carefully, making sure that all articles are included and that the format looks correct
- FTP the file to the correct location on your MT site and import it
- All entries should now be added and set to draft mode; use MT power-edit mode to review all and publish them
Some more tips:
- Case matters on category names; make sure they match or you'll get duplicates.
- The template below sets the articles to draft mode rather than publish mode. I used this to double-check everything.
- When importing into MT, I chose the "import entries as me option" and also specified the author as 'brian' which was probably redundant.
- I specified a default category of 'other' in case any entries did not have a category
- I deselected "start/end html title tags" because they weren't necessary in this case
- The MT power edit mode is really handy for fixing categories, changing draft/publish status, etc.
Here is a sample CityDesk template which will dump all articles (in this case from my 'News' folder) into the proper Movable Type format.
{$ setDateTimeFormat "English" "MM/dd/yyyy" "hh:mm:ss tt"$}
{$foreach x in (folder "News") SortDescendBy .filedDate$}
AUTHOR: brian
TITLE: {$x.headline$}
DATE: {$x.fileddate$} {$x.filedtime$}
PRIMARY CATEGORY: {$x.keywords$}
STATUS: Draft
CONVERT BREAKS: 0
-----
BODY:
{$x.body$}
-----
{$ if nonblank x.teaser$}EXCERPT:
{$x.teaser$}
-----{$ endif $}
--------{$ next $}
