Monday, November 24th, 2008
SSL plugin that suites your needs. You can setup URIs that must be handled by Wordpress only through https.
Features three Es:
- Easy to install
- Easy configuration
- Easy to use
Installation:
- Get (download) the plugin
- Unzip the contents
- Copy the whole directory into your Wordpress plugin directory (usually located in /wp-content/plugins/)
- Go into Plugins management in Wordpress back-end and activate plugin
- Go into Options -> SSL in your Wordpress back-end and setup the plugin
Make sure that you have HTTPS available on your server with correct certificate, else you can disable your whole website. If this happens to you you'll need to disable this plugin directly through database.
Usage:
Check "Secure URLs with SSL" and type-in URIs you whish to be accessed only through HTTPS.
foliopress ssl options
You can use "*" as wildcard for some URI, if you type it after "/" it means that all URIs under this URI will be accessed only via https, if there is no / it takes all URIs under this URI, this URI including.
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Monday, November 17th, 2008
We recently rescued a complex and older weblog Uncoy.com from Typepad and moved it to Wordpress with absolutely zero broken links or posts.
Why do we write rescue? First of all Typepad is a truly awful platform for anything but the most basic weblog.
- images look terrible
- CSS is difficult to alter
- stats are a joke
- tech support is a close tie for the worst on the web
Secondly, it wasn't easy. SixApart make it really difficult in fact. It's only easy if you are ready to accept:
- broken permalinks
- missing comments
- disappearing images
Making the move work involved:
- special plugins on export and import
- collecting all the images via a special script
- adding a special plugin to prevent Wordpress from breaking comments in your post
- installing a plugin to allow you to keep categories at root level (not easy in Wordpress, perhaps the only plus of the Typepad system is that categories default to the root directory)
- adding a special plugin to allow you to update your permalinks easily (the Typepad permalinks are terrible)
- creating archive templates which match the Typepad setup
- adapting a theme to suit the setup of your Typepad weblog (if you have a relatively complex layout)
The detailed steps are below - the list above is just the executive highlights.
Was it worth it:
The day my weblog was finally out of the hands of Typepad and safely into Wordpress was one of the happiest days of my online life.
I wish you the same success. But buckle up - the going gets rough:
Updated Step by Step Guide to moving from Typepad to Wordpress
- Use custom Movable Type export template to export the content of your Typepad blog. You need to use this template to preserve the original URLs for the articles.
- Install Wordpress on your site (guide).
- Log in into Wordpress administation interface and set up a custom permalink structure /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html (Options | Permalinks).
- Copy Foliovision Movable Type and TypePad (fv-mt.php - view source - download) into wp-admin/import/ and use it to import the Typepad exported file. You need to use this custom import plugin to preserve the original permalinks.
fv_mt import plugin
- Install Top Level Categories plugin to remove /category/ from category URL. Then leave Category base in Options | Permalinks blank.
- Use Disable wp-texturize plugin, if you have problems with HTML comments in the posts.
-
Move all the images from all the domains to some nice directory structure on your new site if necessary. There are many ways how to achieve this - we created a simple PHP script show_posts.php for this (this script will put all your posts to one page, so the images are easier to download). Put it to your Wordpress directory (the one containing wp-config.php file) and then enter its URL into your favourite web page downloader and set it to download all the images that are referenced directly from the show_posts.php page (it's usualy called the depth parameter, set it to 1).
We used Teleport Pro to do this, it's a shareware utility with a fourteen day trial, plenty of time to get your Typepad images safely off the SixApart servers. After installing, create new project using New Project Wizard. In first step select Duplicate a website, including directory structure and click Next.
New Project Wizard
Enter address of the show_post.php file and number 1 bellow in How deeply would you like Teleport to explore? input box.
Starting Address
In 3rd step select Text and graphics and then run the project.
All the images will be downloaded into the directory where you save the project file, into nice directory structure with the original domain names and full paths.
- Now it's time to decide how to organize the images directory on your new site. So make your choice and don't forget take notes about this, as it will be crucial in the next step. Upload the newly organized images directory structure to the /images directory on your site via FTP.
- Then use Search Regex plugin to update links and images in the posts. Be very careful about this. It's a good idea to back up your database first.
If the original image URL was http://site.com/people/image01.jpg, replace http://site.com/people/ in all posts with /images/people/ (it will work for all the images and directories in this directory!). Of course all depends on your new /image directory structure
- Create 301 redirections for the images on the original locations if necessary (to keep up with the Google Image search, this is basically the same as). Get all the images URLs from the Movable Type export file or database. Find all the images from the domains you have access to and write .htaccess rules for them. Here's an example of such rule:
RewriteRule ^/images/(.*) http://newsite.com/images/oldsite/$1 [R=permanent,L]
- Install Redirection plugin and activate "Create 301 when post slug changes" in its options. This will make sure that the original typepad post URLs will be working even if you change them. This is the Foliovision advanced version which allows you to clean up multiple redirections. You can find more documentation and an earlier version of Redirection at UrbanGiraffe.
- After installing the Redirection plugin and running the site for few days, check the 404 log in this plugin to get rid of all 404 errors.
- Set up some nice theme with edit buttons bellow both posts and comments and all the other stuff. We assume, that you want your page to look the same as it look on Typepad.
- Create archive page which lists of all the months and years and categories if necessary.
- Create about page.
- Check trackbacks.
- If you are testing your new site on some other domain and you plan to move it when finished - be careful about _capabilities and _user_level meta values in _usermeta table and _user_roles in _options table when moving Wordpress from one database to another!
The original mechanics are based on conversations with Michael Hampton
and Anu's Typepad to Wordpress Switch. Thanks guys
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