I successfully migrated this website from MovableType 4.35 to WordPress 3.8.1. These are my notes from the migration in case they are helpful for anyone else. The good news is this is pretty straightforward, and there are plenty of notes out there (just search the internet for “WordPress MovableType import”). The tricky parts are the custom or special areas of your MovableType installation, and mine was no exception. First, why switch to WordPress? I wanted something more current with a stronger platform of plugins and themes. I’ve been happy with MovableType and stuck through it over many versions and changes.…
The code and design for this site have pretty stagnant for the last two years. Everything was functional, but the design was old and needed some serious improvement. With the recent release of MovableType 4.1, I decided to put some time into this and get it upgraded. Many hours later, it’s done! I spent lots of time on this — probably too much — but wanted to come up with a clean upgrade process. To back up a step and look at what I was trying to achieve, these were my goals for the upgrade: Create a more useful template…
After playing with the beta build on a couple of systems, I finally updated this site to the new Movable Type 3.2 release. It was a little more complicated that I had hoped, but I was being extra careful and tried running in a “staging” location first. I started down the path of creating a brand new instance to get the new templates, but it didn’t look simple to copy over all my settings manually. Here’s the sequence I finally used: Backup everything Convert data from Berkeley (DB_File) format to MySQL; I had been meaning to do this for a…
(Updated: Corrected link to the sample presentation.) Anil Dash from Six Apart posted instructions for implementing Eric Meyer’s S5 slideshow system with MovableType templates. This is a great example of both the simplicity of the S5 system and the power of a template-driven website. In a couple of minutes, I implemented the technique on Cantoni.org to see how well it works (see Cantoni.org Slideshow for the result). The longer posts and images overflow the page, but it’s a quick example that shows what is possible.
I’ve finally decided to give MovableType a try to see how it compares to CityDesk.