WordPress
This blog now runs on WordPress. It was surprisingly easy to install, and the Movable Type importer worked well except that it didn’t fill in the post_date_gmt column. My Movable Type permalinks were of the form:
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d/"$><$MTEntryTitle dirify="1" trim_to="25"$>.html
This translates to:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
in WordPress. The differences are that WordPress uses hyphens instead of underscores and that it doesn’t trim the title to 25 characters. So, to keep my old permlinks working, I changed the WordPress slugs for the imported posts to the Movable Type format:
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name = SUBSTRING(REPLACE(post_name, '-', '_'), 1, 25)
I also changed line 183 of wp-blog-header.php to make it not delete underscores from the slug in the URL:
$name = preg_replace('/[^_a-z0-9-]/', '', $name);
Finally, after some mod_rewrite fun, all the links from Movable Type should still be valid, and they should permanent-redirect to the new, cruft-free URLs.
For the record, I think Six Apart makes a good product. I’m not upset by their price increases, nor have I been itching for something under the GPL. I simply prefer WordPress.
