With the recent and long-awaited release of Movable Type Open Source, I undertook to port my blog at Webquills.net to the new MTOS.
Why MTOS?
I've never felt comfortable publishing my content in proprietary software. Even if I could obtain it gratis, I was always paranoid that the license would change out from under me and I would suddenly find myself in a panic trying to port my content to some other system. So I started blogging on the GPL-licensed Wordpress, and I liked it well enough.
I am a Perl programmer by trade, and though my PHP skills are reasonably good, I would feel much more comfortable hacking on Perl code. MTOS is written in Perl so it gets points. That's my first reason for switching.
My second and more pressing reason to switch to MTOS is its static publishing model. I run my blog on a web server that's light on memory, and what memory there is, I like to use for my own web development. Using a heavy Apache/PHP process to serve a page whose content has not changed in weeks is a luxury that I'd rather not have to pay for. I'm willing to trade slightly delayed publishing for lightweight static file serving.
Installing MTOS
Installing MTOS was pretty simple. Not quite as simple as installing Wordpress, but simple enough that anyone comfortable with a Unix shell (or well-skilled with their FTP client) can get it done without breaking a sweat.
Be warned, however, that as of this writing no "stable" builds of MTOS have been released. I'm using one of the nightly builds, and it works fine for me, but you may run into some issues. If that bothers you, stick with the commercial version until the first MTOS stable release comes out.
I pretty much followed the installation instructions for Linux. I created a MySQL database for MTOS to use, and a new user with full permissions on the database. Then I grabbed the latest nightly build from the MovableType.org archive. Simply untarring it into my chosen destination was enough to get started. Then I walked through the "install wizard" filling in the blanks as needed. None of the questions were particularly tough to answer. :)
After completing the installation, I got some warnings that MTOS did not have permission to write to the /mt-static/support/ directory. Apparently this is where MTOS stores uploaded files and its own reports. I did a chown www-data mt-static/support so the web server could write there, and the complaints went away. I also had to do this to the output directory where I told MTOS to write my blog.
Migrating the content
The step that surprised me the most was migrating my Wordpress content to MTOS. It was shockingly easy. I entered the Wordpress admin area and selected Manage -> Export from the menus. Pressed the button, and I have a Wordpress eXtended RSS feed (WXR file) containing all my posts, comments, and categories (and probably other stuff too).
Then I went to MTOS and clicked to System Overview -> Import. I set the type to WXR and uploaded my Wordpress data. Snap! Just like that MTOS had my posts, comments, and categories all sorted out and ready to use. I punched the publish button and had a web site ten seconds later.
Final cleanups
I picked the most boring MTOS style I could find (because a blog should resemble its owner :P), and made just one customization. I wanted to point users to my FeedBurner feed instead of the local one. I picked Design -> Templates from the menu, then picked Template Modules and edited the Header module. I also had to change the "subscribe" link in the Sidebar modules. (Well, it wasn't as easy as it sounds. It took ten minutes of clicking around to find the right bit to edit. Still, it wasn't exactly hard, either.)
That done, I republished, and was ready to go.
The trickiest part of the migration had little to do with either Wordpress or Movable Type. It was simply that the URLs for my blog entries were going to change under the new system. But cool URIs don't change, so I needed to create a translator for the old ones. I handled this using a simple Apache directive with some Regex Fu.
RedirectMatch permanent ^/(\d\d\d\d/\d\d/[^/]*)/?$ \
http://www.webquills.net/scroll/$1.html
More to come?
I'll probably publish some more comments about MTOS as I get used to using and customizing it. In the interim, I can say that the migration process from Wordpress to MTOS is surprisingly easy and should not be considered an excuse for not switching!
