LibraryTechtonics

I just wanted to share with you a bit I wish I’d known *before* I imported my MT posts.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there’s a difference between how Movable Type formats post slugs, subbing underscores for spaces (the WordPress lingo for the filename at the end of a permalink URL, i.e., wordpress_insta.html), and how WordPress formats slugs, using dashes for spaces (i.e., wordpress-insta.html). While there is a handy little plugin-plus-poking method that can fix the for you, the rub is that it really needs to be installed *before* you import your posts, not after, since the plugin only updates posts henceforth made. So while my new post was formatted all nice and pretty, the old ones still needed help.

Arg.

So I went back, deleted the first round of imports from the database using PHPMyAdmin, then reimported them (a reimport will not overwrite the posts, at least not the first time I tried it… I’m guessing there’s a way, but it’s really kinda moot now). Now they work quite nicely. I don’t feel too badly about the time taken to fix this little problem, especially given that the base install was so easy.

Another wee bitty problem with the import after changing the way that slug paths render was having an .htaccess file. There is a snippet of code that needed to go into the .htacces file to enable all sorts of overwriting fun. So I created that file, uploaded it, and all was well. (If this doesn’t make sense, feel free to ask questions. It just seems like a whole lot of dry tech to explain, unless you’re looking for the answer explicitly.)

So now the permalinks on the posts are behaving better. The permalinks on the pages (the software makes it possible for you to create whole pages of content in WP that aren’t blog posts or blog pages, but really straight HTMLish looking pages), on the other hand, are another story. It seems like it’s not possible to make the about page “about.html” instead of “about,” or, rather “/about/”. While the permalink custom changes I made to the posts, in theory, *should* carry over to pages, it doesn’t seem like it. At least, not yet. I’ll poke a it more tomorrow (and any feedback is appreciated).

If you’d like to see the very beta version, feel free to take a look. I’ll work on it some more tomorrow, and once I have it in a really good place, I’ll do some uninstall/reinstall/announcement of new feeds to share with you.

Tags: movable type