HowTo: Make the move to Wordpress from a hosted service

I just moved this blog from Typepad to Wordpress and figured that writing up my experience might help someone else. I won’t get into the merits of each system. If you’re thinking of switching, you can probably do that analysis for yourself. My switch was not without problems, so this is intended to be the blog post I wish I could’ve had as a reference during my switch. Last note: this is probably a pretty good checklist for any platform switch–even if you aren’t moving to Wordpress from Typepad, there’s probably at least a little food for thought on your own switch. Anyway, here we go…

Get a domain. With hosted services like Typepad and Blogger, you don’t need to buy a domain name since they’ll just assign a “subdomain” to you (myblog.typepad.com instead of myblog.com). But you can associate a domain with your account–if you’ve done this, keep reading. If you aren’t using a domain on your hosted site, then you can stop reading here. Any permanent bookmarks or links that other people have for you will be broken. If you’ve been using a domain name and you go with something like Wordpress, or Textpattern or other standalone packages, then this post is for you. If you still want to work though this and need a domain name, there are tons of places to buy domains for super cheap. I’ve used Web.com and Godaddy.com in the past, but I currently administer all my domains through Pairnic.com. They’re a little more expensive, but they’ve got some great administration tools. Also, many times you can just buy your hosting and your domain all at the same time, which makes it a lot easier. I know this is the case with Dreamhost.

Pick a webhost. The sheer number of webhosts can be overwhelming, but if you’re switching from TP to WP, you’ve already got some built-in criteria. I was on the deluxe TP plan, which is $150/year. So $150/year was my top-end limit for selecting a host. There are some tools for breaking down hosting options by criteria and I’ve actually gone with a couple of hosts that I found through a service called FindMyHosting.com, but I was always a little skeptical about how straight up their reviews were. I think the better option is to check out the hosts of the blogs or websites that you dig. Ask the owners who they’re using and if they’d stick with them. Once I’ve narrowed down a handful of hosts, I do a little Google due dilligence on ‘em. Having said all that, I can comfortably recommend these three potential webhosts:

• Dreamhost. This is what I’m currently using. They’ve got a great reputation, good prices and have been rock solid for me so far. Documentation is decent and, like many webhosts, they’ve got a bulletinboard system so folks can help each other out. Highly recommended.
• Webhostingbuzz. I’ve been a webhostingbuzz client for about three years. I’ve used them for several projects and they’ve got excellent pricing and decent reliablity. They do go down once in a while and back in the early days, I think I remember having some pretty serious data loss. Haven’t seen any troubles like that in the last couple of years though.
• Webjive. Webjive is a new kid on the block. My friends Aj and Jason run it. It’s been live for less than a year and has a relatively small client base (which translates into awesome customer service). If you read the rest of this post and get kinda freaked out by the technical bits, give serious consideration to Webjive–they’d probably do most, if not all, of this stuff for you. Why didn’t I go with Webjive? Well, I selected a host based on a bigger ecommerce project that I’m working on right now and needed lots of space, secure certificates, etc. Webjive could certainly handle those needs, but their focus is on more personal blog-type clients.

Install Wordpress. Here’s where things can begin to get a little bit technical. If you’re using Dreamhost, you can select ‘Goodies’ from the left side menu and then select ‘One Click Installs.’ Select Wordpress and it’ll walk you through it. If you’re using Webhostingbuzz, go to the “Fantastico” menu and look for the Wordpress installation wizard. If you’re using Webjive, I think you can use the Fantastico thing, too. Or you can just send them a note and Jason or Aj will probably just do it for you. The thing you want to keep in mind is where your blog will be located, URL-wise. Let’s say you bought a domain of xyz.com. What do you want people to see if they go to xyz.com? The blog? If so, then you’ll want to install Wordpress in the “root” or top-level directory. If you want to have a special front page and have people click through to the blog, then you’ll want to install Wordpress in it’s own directory like “blog” or something. Your webhost should have tools for you to do this, or you can use an FTP program to do it. I like Transmit for the Mac and SSH for Windows.

Develop a theme. If you aren’t interested in mucking around in css, php or html, Wordpress has a huge number of free templates available. These are pretty much just plug and play. If you want to customize a bit, you’ll have to get your hands dirty. For this site, I used liewcf’s three column Kubrick design as a jumping off point. I haven’t done much to it aside from making the page wider and changing the header parameters.

Export your posts from Typepad. To do this you’ll need to log into TP and navigate to the Weblogs tab. Right below the tab there are several links and a searchbar. To the left of the searchbar you’ll see a link for ‘Import/Export.’ You want to scroll to the bottom of that page and right-click on the link to save the export file somewhere on your harddrive.

Import your posts into Wordpress. Now, assuming you’ve got Wordpress 2.0 or higher installed, log into Wordpress and navigate to the Import link at the top of the page (right next to Options). To import Typepad data, you’ll want to select the Movable Type link. Navigate to where you stored your Typepad file and click the import button. This can take a while, so go get a snack. When it’s done, it’ll give you some messages that everything went well. If it timed out or something, you can re-import and it’s smart enough to not duplicate your entries. It grabbed all of mine (400+ posts and 1,600+ commments) in one pass. When it’s done importing, go check out your new blog.

Clean up the post names. Okay now it’s going to get a little scary. Wordpress use a database called MySQL to store most of its information. You’re going to go into the database and make changes to one of the tables. ‘wp_posts’ is the name of the table you’ll be making changes to. The deal with these changes is that your old Typepad blog (generally) only allowed post names in the URL to be 15 characters long and it separated words with underscores. The Wordpress setup has a 200 character limit and uses dashes between words. When I exported from Typepad and imported to Wordpress, my new post URLs were longer than the TP ones, and they had dashes instead of underscores. If you don’t have many posts (or if you have a LOT of time), you can just set up redirects for each post and be done with it (see the next section about redirects). I had a lot of posts and not much time, so I decided that I would try to mimic the TP URL scheme as closely as I could. I wanted to change all the dashes to underscores and truncate all the posts to 15 characters. I did this with two SQL commands in phpMyAdmin, which is a frontend for your MySQL database. If you’re using either Dreamhost or Webhosting buzz, you should find a link for it. Once you’re in the application, go to the SQL tab at the top of the page and drop in this text:


UPDATE wp_posts
SET post_name = LEFT(post_name,15)

and hit the Go button. It’ll only take a second to shorten all your post names. Next drop in this text:


UPDATE wp_posts
SET post_name = REPLACE(post_name, '-', '_')

Again, it’ll only take a moment to replace all the dashes with underscores. Time for the next step.

Fix your “permalinks.” When you set up a new Typepad blog, you must choose a folder name. I didn’t really understand the reason for that when I first set up Slacker Manager, so I just named my folder ’slacker_manager.’ The result was that all of the permanent links to all my posts had the folder name stuck between the domain name and the archive location. That was a drag. Fortunately, it’s not that tough to fix when you switch, if you’re willing to make some concessions in favor of making it easy on yourself. What we’re aiming for here is to preserve the way your old links were formatted, but dropping that pesky folder name. So your old links would look like this:

http://xyz.com/typepad_folder/2005/12/your_post.html

And your new links will look like this:

http://xyz.com/2005/12/your_post.html

The way links get fixed is with a special file called “.htaccess.” That dot at the front isn’t a typo. There are a bunch of ways that .htaccess can do voodoo and I don’t understand any of it. Fortunately there are a couple easy tricks that even a bonehead like me can understand. First, you’ll want to create an .htaccess file by logging into Wordpress and making custom permalinks. Log in and navigate to the Options section and click on Permalinks. In the text field for Custom structure, drop in this code:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

This basically recreates the old Typepad style links, but without the pesky folder name. It also creates your .htaccess file on your server. Now you need to get into your FTP application and log into your server and find that .htaccess file. You might need to fiddle with your FTP settings in order to “show hidden files” so you can find .htaccess. Open it up with a text editor (on Mac I like Textwrangler, on Windows I like CrimsonEditor). You should see something like this:


# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php

# END WordPress


Don’t mess with that stuff, but make sure that everything you enter goes up above it in the file. You’ll want to redirect any link that comes from http://yourdomain.com/typepad_folder/year/month/post_name.html to http://yourdomain.com/year/month/post_name.html. Add the following code to the top of your .htaccess file:


RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
Redirect /typepad_folder http://yourdomain.com


Save it and go try it out (remember, you should replace “typepad_folder” and “yourdomain.com” with your own stuff). Find one of your old posts and load it in a browser–it should redirect to your new, cleaned up URL. If everything works right (and it rarely does), you should be good to go.

Credits: Big thanks to Adam Stiles for his pointers on the same topic, and also to Matt and Brandon for the SQL help.