Simone Carletti's Blog » movabletype

Movable Type to WordPress Importer Utilities

Simone Carletti — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:14:24 +0000

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

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.

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

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!

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

How to integrate coComment with Movable Type (>= 3.2)

Simone Carletti — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 09:59:08 +0000

December 30th, 2008. This post was published long time ago on the Italian version of my blog then moved here after the English blog has been opened. Please note that the following post can contain outdated information and (probably) multiple typos.

On Semptember 18, coComment staff posted a news about an update of the code used to integrate comments tracking on your blog. The code sets a few blog variables such as page title or blog name used by coComment system to ensure that all blog details are correctly detected.
If you use a coComment supported blogging platform you can forget to manually integrate coComment inside your blog, but it’s always recommended.

To integrate coComment into your Movable Type blog you should follow these instructions.

Movable Type code

Starting from the new tracking code schema, the following code is the Movable Type version.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23

Edit Individual Entry Archive template

In a default Movable Type 3.2 or 3.3 installation the comment form is included into the Individual Entry Archive Template.

Open your template manager (Main Menu > Select your blog > Templates > Archives > Individual Entry Archive) and add the code above before the .

Edit Comment Preview Template

Open your template manager (Main Menu > Select your blog > Templates > System > Comment Preview Template) and add the tracking code before the tag.

Rebuild your site

Now save, close all templates and rebuild your blog.

Note. This quick tutorial is valid for a default Movable Type Installation. If you changed the default templates it’s up to you to find the right templates and add the tracking code.

Creating a blog sitemap with Movable Type

Simone Carletti — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 09:00:29 +0000

This tutorial targets Movable Type 3.2. Although the template should work on later versions, you are strongly encouraged to update it according to the specific Movable Type tag syntax provided by your current version.

Movable Type provides an excellent template engine that can be easily tweaked to create a XML Sitemap.

Basically, you just need to create a new index template and ask Movable Type to rebuild it each time your blog is updated.

The Sitemaps Protocol enables you to inform search engine crawlers about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling and helps search engines to find all your pages.

To create a new template enter the Movable Type administration panel.

Blog Dashboard > Templates > Indexes and press Create New Index Template to add a new template to your blog configuration.

Choose an easy to understand Template Name — for example Sitemaps — and an easy to remember file name — for example sitemap.xml.

Configure Movable Type to rebuild the template automatically when rebuilding index templates and fill the Template Body textarea with the following code

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41

<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>
1.0
daily

http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/index.xml
1.0
daily

http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/atom.xml
1.0
daily

<$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$>
<$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$>

<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>

<$MTArchiveLink$>

Please note that bold styled strings must be replaced with your own settings.

Save the new template and… your new sitemap file is ready.

That’s all! Now login into your Google Account, go to the Sitemaps admin panel and submit your sitemap to Google.

Before closing this article, let’s have a look at the template source code.

First of all, according to Google Sitemap Specifications, you need to declare the XML file and schema.

1
2

Now you are ready to start your URL list.

Add your blog main URL using <$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$> template tag. Set the higher priority value and (if required) the update frequency.

1
2
3
4
5

<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>
1.0
daily

Then list the Atom and RSS feeds

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/index.xml
1.0
daily

http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/atom.xml
1.0
daily

and all entries.

1
2
3
4
5
6

<$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$>
<$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$>

Finally, complete the recipe with all category indexes

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>

and monthly archives, if they are enabled.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

<$MTArchiveLink$>

The original tutorial was posted by Nial Kennedy. The code published above is an updated version based on the original post.