I just switched from Movable Type to WordPress. I’ve been thinking about doing it for quite a while, and the last straw was when it started taking 10-15 seconds to post a comment. I had a little over 4,000 comments and that seemed to be too much for MT to handle.
It’s going to take a few days of tweaking before I get everything to be working again, but I believe the basic functionality of the site should be working (i.e. posting comments and reading archives).
If you do see something that isn’t working, please let me know.
I’m also going to need to figure out what to do about the old permanent links that may not be as permanent as I had hoped. You’ll notice that I’ve now moved to a format that is much more readable and can be duplicated by other blogging software in case I ever switch again.
The switch wasn’t really that bad. I ran into a few snags here and there, but I’m quite pleased that I’m using PHP for my blogging platform now because that’s what I had been using for everything else on the site.
Welcome to the team! ; )
Welcome, man
If you need help, I’m here.
Thanks guys. So far I’ve been pleased with how things are going in the transition. It’s great to hit the post button and have the comment show up a second or two later.
Hey Cool!! Welcome to WordPress. I made the move a while ago and have been really happy with it. Hope you are too.
Hmm… you will have to let me know how it goes. :)
Just wondering… what kind of plugin is there for WP to fight comment spam?
I heard that someone tweaked MT Blacklist (Possibly Allen himself?) to be used on WP?
Is that the same plugin or a different one?
I know there is one where moderation is required for new comments on entries older than 7 days…
Here’s a wiki page on how to combat spam with WordPress. And you’re right, there’s a WordPress version of MT Blacklist, but there’s also comment moderation by the number of links in the comment.
I’ve also found the Three Strikes Plugin and one that has integrated SpamAssassin that sound promising.
I also hear that in version 1.3 it has some built in bulk comment deletion.
And the moderation after a few days can be found here.
Cool. That’s going to come in 1.3 by default too. I wonder how much longer 1.3 will be.
I think we would be lucky to see it for Christmas. I have been using 1.3 alpha on my site for a bit and I really can’t complain at all, everything seems to work. The bulk comment moderation is nice. Depending on how much you changed the default index.php and wp-layout.css expect quite a bit of time to upgrade to 1.3.
I made extensive modifications to index.php and I use my own stylesheet instead of wp-layout.css, but I only have 5-10 calls to the WP framework, so I’m hoping it won’t be too bad. I’d prefer to go with a beta instead of the alpha, but maybe I’ll switch anyway.
Congrats … I’ve been happy with WordPress ever since I started using it. Hope you like it to. Pretty quickly I’m sure I’ll be having to ask you questions about Worpdress if I can’t figure something out.
It may be too late if you’ve already done your import/export, but there’s a hack that we used, which keeps the post ID intact.
If the post ID is the same, then through .htaccess you can redirect archives to the correct post using the p= query on wordpress.
E.g., if it was archives/0001.html, set the htaccess to redirect to index.php?p=1 .
The key to making that work is preserving the ID, which does _not_ happen in normal WP import, but there’s a hack we used to do this. As a result, all of our old archive links are still functional.
You can also set up your WP permalinks to configure just like the MT permalinks, but I haven’t quite gotten that to work on my site. (And haven’t needed to, really — once I did the htaccess, I stopped worrying about it). Again, the key will be preserving the same post ID.
Kaimi: That would have been helpful but I just posted about how I did link conversions and from what I can tell they seem to be working.
I was planning to switch to the new link format anyway though, so I’ll use that going forward and leave the forwarding in place.
Do you think MT’s going to do anything about the comment issue? It’s prevalent on a lot of blogs I got to, even ones w/o many comments.
Renee: Their solution was to release 3.x but I don’t know if that has solved the slowness or not.
I wasn’t willing to upgrade because I didn’t want to pay the amount they were asking. It’s not because I’m not willing to pay; I contributed $50 voluntarily when I began using it, but 3.0 wasn’t worth what they were asking, especially when WordPress is better in certain respects and is open source.
I just found a category on DMOZ about how to avoid comment spam and referrer spam.