A long overdue migration

Now, it's a been some time now since Moveable Type became a lot less free. I had planned on moving to Wordpress for quite some time, and after downloading numerous versions over the years (all named 'latest.tar.gz' with not a hint of versioning, ugh), I finally got around to installing it this weekend.

It's up and running here right now. Except you'd never know it.

A long time ago, I followed Mark Pilgrim's excellent guide to cruftless URIs, and made my MT config nice and slick. The slugs became simple keywords, with no spaces, underscores, or dashes, and my URIs were about as nice looking as URIs can be.

Despite using the exact same template for Wordpress as I do for MT (/archives/year/month/date/post), I simply could not get the entries to match up.

First problem, MT uses underscores in its slugs, WP uses hyphens. Fortunately, there's a plugin for WP that fixes that issue. Moving on.

Second problem, and much larger than the first, WP doesn't have support for keywords. Well shit, that puts me up the proverbial creek without a goddamned paddle, now doesn't it?! There's, um, another plugin that handles that situation as well, but it's not fully supported. While I can now enter keywords into my entries, the MT importer did not bring the keywords over with the entries, and I still can't use keywords in my URIs.

Speaking of the importer, when I first exported my entries from MT, I hadn't noticed how large the resulting file was. Turns out it was 9.5 megs. The reason for that? I left trackbacks turned on for 3 entries, and I was completely inundated with ping spam. Infuriating. I had to manually edit out over 250,000 lines of crap before I could import my entries into WordPress without getting a timeout.

Thirty minutes of digging around in WP's code, and I'm getting close to a solution for this. I can almost use %keyword% in the WP permalink listing to get it sorted out. Almost. It's a larger undertaking than I would have hoped.

As it turns out, I'm not the first person to run into this problem. However, that thread started in January of 2005, and there's still not a solution for it. It's now September of 2006, and this is making my conversion go a lot less smoothly. Damn.

I want to use WordPress, I really do, for many reasons. But I'm not going to edit my .htaccess every time I write a new entry to accomplish what I need to do. Frankly, this is a pain in the ass, and until I get it sorted out, I'll be using my old, still mostly free MT 2.64 installation. (Which I might add became a huge target for spam robots...I had to disable any access to mt-comments.cgi file and also turn off trackbacks for every entry.)