Movable Type to WordPress Importer Utilities

Are you looking for a solution to migrate from Movable Type to WordPress without loosing any permalink? Do you need to import in WordPress your Movable Type tags? Continue reading, this post contains the solution to those problems.

Feel free to skip to the end of the post if you don't care about the story behind the Movable Type Importer Utilities library.

The story

I have been using Movable Type since I opened the first version of this blog, in 2005. At this time Movable Type was so far the best not-hosted blogging platform.

Time passes and things change. In the last couple of years WordPress development team did an excellent work and the latest WordPress 2.7 branch is an authentic masterpiece. The only plugin manager and the auto-update feature worth the full platform.

At the beginning of this year I migrated my Italian blog from Movable Type to WordPress and I opened the English version. While creating a new blog from scratch has been a piece of cake, migrating the existing blog required careful planning to avoid loosing visibility and popularity on search engines.

Moreover, all my Movable Type entries were carefully tagged and categorized. Easy to understand, preserving tags and categories was one of my migration constraints.

Here comes the problem

WordPress comes with a powerful Movable Type and TypePad imported but unfortunately this tool lacks two important features: it doesn't migrate your Movable Type tags and it doesn't take care of your old post permalinks. What a nightmare!

I tried to solve those problems in many different ways and I ended up creating my own importer integration. After a couple of months of incubation, this morning I finally had the time to write a small documentation and release the package.

Movable Type Importer Utilities is the solution

Movable Type Importer

The Movable Type Importer Utilities repository is available on github. The project is called wordpress-mtimporter and it's released under the GNU General Public License, the same as WordPress. Perhaps someone at WordPress will notice this package someday in the future and integrate it into the main WordPress release.

Feel free to fork, edit and contribute to the project. Let me know if this project helps you in some way!

In the following day I'm going to post some step by step tutorial to demonstrate how to migrate from Movable Type to WordPress without loosing any permalink or how to import in WordPress your Movable Type tags.

Overview

Movable Type Importer Utilities is a small collection of utilities to finalize your migration from Movable Type to Wordpress.

It is not a replacement for the official Movable Type and TypePad importer but provides additional tools not available in the original library shipped with WordPress 2.7.

Default WordPress importers

The .htaccess generator creates an Apache .htaccess configuration file to redirect all your MovableType entries to the corresponding WordPress posts.

Movable Type Importer: .htaccess generator

The tag importer solves the problem of importing in WordPress all your Movable Type tags. According to the resources linked from the official WordPress documentation, this is one of the most painful downside. Thanks to the tag importer, this is no longer a pain in the ass!

Movable Type Importer: Tags importer

For further details and the full documentation please visit the wordpress-mtimporter project on GitHub.