Today I reluctantly migrated the blog from Movable Type to WordPress. There are many things I like about Movable Type, especially in version 4.0, but for whatever reason it was very slow and seemed to keep getting slower. I installed FastCGI but wasn’t sure if it ever worked, made sure the database was properly indexed and that it wasn’t slowing things down, and tried to tweak other things where I could. Eventually I decided that I was tired of dealing with slow performance, and didn’t have the energy to take the debugging to the next level.

Anyway, it was relatively easy to move my content into WordPress, so I took the plunge. Right now I’m using a slightly modified version of the Cutline theme, but I expect to make it more my own soon enough.

Getting the old links to blog posts to work was somewhat difficult. When I migrated my posts from Movable Type to WordPress, neither the ID numbers nor the Movable Type basenames made it into the WordPress database. My Movable Type permalinks were based on the basename. I hacked the 404 page in my theme to look up the posts in the Movable Type database by basename, and then use the post title to look up the post in the WordPress database and redirect to the appropriate page. There will be problems with the really old untitled posts, and with any posts that have the same title, but the approach works well enough for now.

I also had to install FeedBurner FeedSmith and PHP Markdown to get things working. Markdown does still work in comments. I’ve also installed WP-OpenID, so you can sign in using your OpenID to comment.

Sadly all of the tags on my posts failed to make it over in the migration. I doubt I’ll go back and tag old posts.

I’m sure there are dozens of other problems that I haven’t found yet, but I’ll iron them out over time. If you see anything obviously broken, please leave a comment and I’ll try to get it fixed.