Last night we cut over to Jess' redesigned site We had fun working on this new design... (Boy, I hope that it looks right under IE, we didn't do to much testing on Windows) In addition to the new look, we upgraded from Movable Type to Wordpress 2.0 and moved her to a new web host. The host change will probably take a little while to trickle down but I set up her old site to redirect traffic to the new place in the meantime.

I was up kind of late trying to make sure that all of her old Movable Type links would redirect to the correct new place in Wordpress. I'll try to update this post later with a little bit of information about what I did.

Update, Thursday night: Okay, so migrating from Movable Type to Wordpress is easy with the provided tools. If if you want to make sure that all of your old links (in Google, on people's sites, wherever) direct people to the proper place then it is a little trickier. Here is what I did. It's doubt that it's the best way, but it worked:

• I read the Preserving Permalinks section of the Wordpress/MT migration page and decided that maintaining the same post ids across systems was the best way to go. Please, do not go with the "use a template to generate a huge .htaccess file" method. That's crazy. Munging your Wordpress permalinks to better fit the old MT way is also yuck.
• I couldn't find any instructions for patching Wordpress 2.0 so that it would do the above. I ended up using Kathy's MT-Numeric-Id Importer. This comes with instructions and it successfully imported everything while maintaining the post IDs.
• The importer left out a few things (probably because of Wordpress 2.0 differences).
  • You need to update the comment counts (inside each post record). Drop this tiny php page in wp-admin, point your browser to it, wait, and delete it when you are done.
  • You need to update the post modification times so that your feeds don't show "0000-00-00 00:00" dates and times. I forget the exact column names but a query like "update wp_posts set post_mod_time = post_time" does the trick.
• Add rewrite rules in .htaccess for feeds, posts, date archives, and category archives. Something like this (the redirects should probably be set to permanent) :
  • RewriteRule ^index\.rdf$ /blog/feed [R,L] (and so on for other feeds)
  • RewriteRule ^archives/cat_categoryname.php /blog/category/categoryname [R,L]
  • RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{6}).php /blog/?p=$1 [R,L] (posts)
  • RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{2}).php /blog/$1/$2 [R,L] (date archive)