Okay so plenty of people have their arguments for which OS solution is better and I’m not going to get into that here, all I will say is that I’ve only ever been asked to move sites to WordPress, and not away from it. I’ve done a couple of moves from moveable type to wordpress this year and this is what I found worked for the big sites.
If the site has a lot of posts and goes back a few years:
- Export to txt file in moveable type
- FTP the images over to new location and decide on folder structuret
- Take the time to look at the code and do a find and replace for things that will break your theme or things you want to change – like image locations
- Change the import time for large MT.txt files by opening the import folder mt file and change 30 to 360
- If the file is still too big to import to WordPress break it into a few files less than 8mb this will normally be a issue with big sites moving to wordpress
- Take the time to get it right because working with these big files can be painfully slow if you have to do the import-export a few times
Some plugins and and polls will need to be replaced so take time to take the elements and work out how you plan to recreate them in WordPress and it will pay off, for example you might create a category called polls and create everything with the information that it had in Moveable type or you might just decide to ditch them if they are old and just start new ones on your wordpress plugin.
Don’t foregt to move any newsletter subscribers, don’t expect them to notice the change an come looking for you.
Permalinks may change so decide if you need only links to work, there are plugin that help and you can also set up some redirects in your .htaccess file.
