Documenting the Move

Posted Fri Feb 4, 2005 in

I’m saving my post on the Textpattern Support Forum for my site. What follows is a part of the story of my move from Movable Type to Textpattern.

Will someone here tell me that I haven’t lost my mind! (Hold that thought while I grab a cup of coffee… :)

I’m in the process of converting my weblog from MT to TP. It’s a middle-sized site, this weblog of mine (about 1,700 entries over the last three years). I’ve encountered a number of problems along the way, each of which has been surmountable.

But with a cost…

I first found the bug in Ramanan’s excellent MT-export file to TP importing script, the issue with MT’s embedded javascript in the MT image-popup code. I have about 250 popup images on my site. I hand edited the export file and trapped most of them (I missed a few, it seems, which means those entries didn’t get imported). I know I should have written a program to do this, and I spent some time on analysis of the issue, but I couldn’t see an algorithm that would accomplish the goal without a lot more analysis. So I brute-forced it.

I also spent some time looking through Ramanan’s code, but am new to PHP (not new to programming) and couldn’t find a problem. (Thanks, Ramanan, BTW…)

Second, although (most of) my entries are in the database now, I’ll have to go through those with photographs and fix the code. I’ll be uploading the images through TP’s interface and editing the entries to use Dean’s super popup “dca_pop”:http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=1228.

Third, I found that Brad Choate’s implementation of Textile for MT is not quite the same as Dean’s original development. I’m now in the process of hand-editing the posts that contain a URL to include the http:// portion of the URL that is required for Dean’s implementation. (Why is it that Brad felt he had to tinker with what Dean had done… :( )

So, call this post a combination of a vent, an appeal for encouragement to see the process through, an appeal for any ideas that someone might have to shorten the process, and a documentation of a substantial move from one CMS to another.

Flame away if you must (I’m flameproof! :), but please, someone, tell me that I haven’t lost my mind… (And now I need that second cup of coffee…)