Changing from Geeklog to MovableType
By Oli
At 2:37 PM · Friday, 1 August · 2003
To Weblogging
Exporting would be a lot easier if I knew what fields MT can/can’t import. Unfortunately the docs only cover exporting from four main competitors, rather than actually detailing what can/can’t be imported, and the required formatting.
The formatting in the MT online docs is:
TITLE: ___ DATE: ___ (in "mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss am/pm" format) AUTHOR: ___ ----- (5) BODY: ___ ----- (5) EXTENDED BODY: ___ -------- (8)
However extra fields like Comment (including Comment Author/Email/URL/Date), Category, and Post Status (draft/publish) are also mentioned. I wonder what else isn’t documented?
Between the online docs and a Perl script by Papa Scott I eventually worked it out. The grep action to go from a Geeklog database dump to MT importing format was pretty hard core for me though ;-) I bet a Perl geek could have written a script in 5 minutes. Damn my ignorance!
I wish there was a ‘delete all’ button for entries for times like when you import 40 entries and discover the formatting is fuct. A button for selecting all entries should at least be on the power-editing page. Manually clicking check-boxes is dumb.
I’ll have to finally learn how to do apache redirects using .htaccess. The old URLs are in the form:
http://oli.boblet.net/article.php?story=20030216031636722
(for the symbolic link article). That’s some serious URL cruft!
