Typepad to Wordpress with Permalinks | 2009 Edition
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 WizardEnter address of the show_post.php file and number 1 bellow in How deeply would you like Teleport to explore? input box.
Starting AddressIn 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
By Alec
Tags: none
10 comments on “Typepad to Wordpress with Permalinks | 2009 Edition”
01
Hi there…
I was so excited to see that you had found a way to simply download all of the images from the the old typepad blog. I am having trouble though because my downloading agent (site sucker) is not seeing past the robots.txt file on the typepad image directory. How did you get around this?
02
Hello tim,
bellow is attached the robots.txt file of our Typepad blog. As you see, there is nothing to do with the images, so we haven’t encoutered any problem like that.
But thanks for pointing this issue out.
What’s your robots.txt file? What about using some other downloader, which behaves more like a browser (we are searching for some nice Firefox Addon with this functionality right now)?
_______
User-agent: *
Disallow: /t/trackback
Disallow: /t/comments
Disallow: /t/stats
Disallow: /t/app
# weird MSIE thing that keeps hammering
User-agent: Active Cache Request
Disallow: *
03
Hi,
I just came across your post on TypePad to Wordpress via google. Thanks for a helpful post.
I am trying to migrate to Wordpress now.
I had quick question. On your step #1… with custom template. It works fine but does not go back far enough in time (we only have about 300 posts over 18 months). Any suggestions on how this script can make sure ALL posts are exported?
Thanks again for a very helpful post!!
Clint
San Jose, CA
04
Hello Clint,
the problem seems to be in the first line of the export template file. This one:
<MTEntries lastn=”5000″>
Try to replace 5000 with 400 if you have about 300 posts. Or try to replace the whole line with just
<MTEntries>
More info about: MTEntries tag: http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/tags/entries.html
Thank you and drop us a message about your progress,one of these should work. Typepad is weird indeed.
05
Hi there,
This looks like a great guide. I had a question: What do you do with the export template in step 1?
On the “design” section of Typepad, I see options to create a new template and create a new template module. Which of these, if either, should I select in order to create the export template?
Sorry for sounding like such a noob. I’m just really eager to get away from Typepad — far, far away!
06
I think you need new template module Terrence. I suggest you email the wretched customer service at Typepad and ask them how to install the custom template you need to migrate away from their awful services.
Let them feel the pain of an export system which just doesn’t work.
If Anil Dash is lurking around here somewhere wondering what he can do to reduce the damage - say it again out loud - we hate typepad! - he could start
I hope Anil won’t pander again his usual tripe about nobody wanting to move away, not having the resources to fix this as they are building new features.
If evangelism could lie and do its job, Anil wouldn’t have been out of bed for the last five years.
07
BTW, if anybody is interested in having their weblog moved flawlessly from Typepad to Wordpress (Typelists intact, design intact, photos intact, permalinks intact), drop us a line.
After a few emails requesting it, we have decided to offer migration as a professional service. It took a programmer and a designer a week (combined) to rescue our weblog first time out (thanks again Anil!) and have it functioning at 100%. It will be faster for us to repeat the process so we are able to offer this service for just $300. In line with the season, we will donate 10% to charity.
In comparison to the hassle of doing the move yourself, this will be the best money you ever spent. If it sounds like a lot of money, don’t make the mistake I did and never start a weblog on Typepad.
Moving away took years of planning and cost me a day of my own time supervising the move as well as three days of programmer time and a day and a half of my designer making things right.
Imagine! You can bring all that Typepad pain to an end, start posting in your own custom Wordpress install this week and support your favorite charity for just a fraction of what the ordeal cost me.
Convenience Guarantee: All orders fulfilled within a week or half price.
PS. This price is a special price offer to 15 January 2009. We don’t want to, but we may have to raise the price as moving a Typepad weblog away properly is such an incredible hassle that we might not be able to continue to do so at this rate.
Please petition Anil Dash to fix the exporter to include permalinks and to allow customers to download their image and video library as a single large zip file which could be conveniently moved to another service.
If Anil and SixApart do the right thing and do those two things - no sign of it in three years - we will be able to retire this service and you will be able to do most of this yourselves in just a couple of steps.
08
Thanks for the responses!
Ok, so here’s what’s going on now:
I set up the Export template as an advanced index template and told it to output to an export.txt file. Unfortunately, it’s only retrieving posts from the last month (or so.)
My suspicion is that this may have something to do with the way archives are published? I tried changing the MTEntries tag as suggested above, but no luck. Should the template be pulling all the posts, or did I misread something? (Always a possibility!)
Hm. Typepad makes me want to kick something!
Thanks again for any help you can offer!
Terrence
09
Hello Terrence,
We were able to export all the entries with this template.
You don’t have to tell the template to output, you just have to try to download the template.
The address for our template in the day was not .txt but .xml
10
Hi Terrence,
what worked for us may not be working for you. This is a rather complex problem, but if you have some programming skills, you should be able to modify the export template with help of this manual page:
http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/tags/entries.html
Good luck!
Martin
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