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Behind the scenes: Our WordPress details

1 August 2006Posted By: Tracy
Posted in: Blog Related

We were asked what plug-ins and themes we used to create our new site and so I thought I’d give some details. I’ll also outline the switch from MovableType to WordPress in case anyone is interested in doing the same someday.

Theme: AndyBlue ver 1 by Matteo Turchetto. The layout works well in larger browsers as is and works well in smaller browsers with only a couple tweaks to the CSS (most important: min-width). It’s actually funny that I tweaked the heck out of the theme then ended up tweaking it full-circle to something that looks pretty similar to the original. Oh well, must have been a good design :-).

Plug-ins:

• Akismet - spam blocker
• Spam Karma 2 - spam blocker #2
• Explicit Category Sort
• Miniblog - for the Tip of the Day
• Markdown - wysiwyg post editor
• Subscribe to Comments
• Underscore Permalinks - for MT compatibility
• WordPress Database Backup

The switch from MovableType 3.0 to WordPress 2.0

The two instruction sets we followed were the WordPress codex and this post at scalefree.com. Below is when we put it all together and the last part was just how we managed the public switch.

1. Install WordPress (well, IPowerWeb has it already installed if you use them for a host)
2. Install the Underscore Permalinks plugin (must be installed BEFORE importing entries)
3. Set-up a permalink structure (may need to create .htaccess file first). Should be /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
4. Export entries from MT
5. Import into WordPress (nothing fancy here). Don’t worry about changing the encoding mentioned in the WordPress codex. MovableType 3.0 uses the same encoding as WordPress. There are actually several things you can ignore in the WP codex (it’s old).
6. Because MT truncates the post urls to 30 characters, you need to run this SQL: UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name=SUBSTRING(post_name,1,30)
7. Some remaining links may not work simply because you changed the title between the initial creation and the WordPress import. For those you need to manually change the slug to match the old permalink.
8. Our WordPress install is at /WordPress, so get it to display at www.studenttabletpc.com, we used this procedure: Giving WordPress it’s own directory
9. Make sure you hide any existing index files in the main directory or you won’t see the WordPress files. Also hide/delete your MovableType archive folders or else your permalinks will display at the MovableType site instead of the WordPress one.
10. If you had any other redirects from the old site, copy them from your old .htaccess file to the new one. I forgot about this at first :-).

That’s pretty much it. Once we got the procedure down it wasn’t so hard, but it took a lot of research to figure out the best way to go about it. Now we have a squeaky clean site with an awesome spam fighter and cool plug-ins to play with.

As an aside, FireFox has an excellent extension called Perfomancing that makes for a great way of posting to any blog inside FireFox. It’s also extremely easy to set up and feature rich (and free), so I recommend taking a look at it if you do any blogging. The Performancing website is pretty informative too and all about blogging.

11 Responses to “Behind the scenes: Our WordPress details”

1. Ron Schott Says:
   August 1st, 2006 at 9:53 pm

   Thanks very much Tracy! You Rock!

2. Tracy Says:
   August 1st, 2006 at 10:32 pm

   Glad to help!

3. Sharon Shaked Says:
   August 1st, 2006 at 11:45 pm

   Wow Tracy Not only the site looks great, you’ve also found the time to help other dev. with the move to WordPress.

   In my opinion you should speak to Trevor and Andrew and put the content of the site into high gear. A great site should have something new to read on a daily basis (or at least a few times a week).

4. Tracy Says:
   August 2nd, 2006 at 1:11 am

   The new site makes it a lot easier to post and actually makes it more exciting to post for me personally (because it’s cooler). you can expect a new post much more often from me, at least.

   Summer’s just a tough time to post for us. We aren’t really thinking about school which makes it hard to get inspired. With internships, there’s just so much to experience in so little time that it’s hard to justify spending time on something you can do at home.

   My internship is over in two weeks and I starting to really think about school again, so things will definitely pick up.

   The idea for the site upgrade was to aid putting the content into high gear, don’t worry!

5. Smartdog Says:
   August 2nd, 2006 at 3:14 pm

   The new look is very professional and clean. I hope you are enjoying the fruits of your labor.

   Thank for the time and knowledge you share.

   Smartdog “We all learn by sharing what we know”

6. scale|free » Typepad to Wordpress Switch - Detailed Instructions Says:
   August 4th, 2006 at 6:06 am

   […] A good set of instructions, partially based on this post […]

7. Pozycjonowanie Says:
   December 11th, 2006 at 6:07 am

   Someone else below asked this already about antyspam sripts. I am getting nailed with Spam on my website mails and in our blog website - now ist offline too much spam. Is there anyway to stop this? If not, there really isn’t any point in leaving it up and active. Any help will be greatly appreciated. http://www.profesjonalna-reklama.pl

   Thanks for help, Keep up the good work. Greetings from Poland

8. tworzenie stron www Says:
   March 31st, 2007 at 6:33 am

   Fantastic article! Very useful informations. I really love it, can I recommend it to my friends?

9. Andy Says:
   November 6th, 2007 at 2:15 pm

   Wonderful written tutorial, helped me out, thanks a lot!

10. przepisy kulinarne Says:
    June 14th, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    Thank you for this article, I appreciate it even more because it is not so common to find those kind of things on the net. Thnx!

11. lierac Says:
    July 9th, 2008 at 1:39 am

    Thanks for very interesting article

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