How to Import MovableType Entries into your WordPress Blog

By Carthik Sharma

Welcome to WordPress. To make your transition from a MovableType powered blog to a WordPress powered blog smooth, WordPress provides an easy way to import the entries from your Movable Type blog.

This How-to assumes the following:

Overview

We have to export all entries from the MovableType blog, edit a file in WordPress, import all the entries into WordPress, and then tie up loose ends, if any.

Step 1: Exporting all the entries from the MovableType blog.

  1. Login to your MovableType blog.
  2. From the main menu, click on the "Manage Weblog" link for the blog whose entries you want to export.
  3. Click the "Import/Export" button on the left menu.
  4. Click the "Export Entries from ..." link at the bottom of page.
  5. Now you should see readable text, split over several lines, in your browser. If the text in one long, running line, and if you are using any version of Internet Explorer, then you have a problem. Internet Explorer sometimes treats plaintext as html. To avoid this problem, use a Gecko-based browser, such as Netscape, Mozilla, or FireFox.
  6. Save the page you see in your browser, with all the entries in text, as a text file with the name "import.txt", on your computer.

Step 2: Editing import-mt.php

  1. Open the file "import-mt.php" which is the directory "wp-admin" in your WordPress installation in your favourite text editor. For this, you have to download it first.
  2. On line number 2 of import-mt.php, find
    define('MTEXPORT', '');
    and change that to
    define('MTEXPORT', 'import.txt');
  3. Save import-mt.php and upload it to the "wp-admin" directory on your server, overwriting the existing "import-mt.php".
  4. Upload the "import.txt" file you had saved in step 1.f. to the "wp-admin" directory on your server.

Step 3: Importing the entries into WordPress

  1. Login to your WordPress blog as admin.
  2. Go to http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/import-mt.php using your browser.
  3. Click on the link that says "Let's go".
  4. You will see a number of "Importing entry ...." on your browser.

That was easy :)

Step 4: Odd Ends

  1. The default password for the new users created corresponding to the MovableType blog authors, say "mtuserX", is "changeme". You can use this password to login as "mtuserX". It is recommended that you change the passwords for the newly created users , as someone else could login using "changeme".
  2. Drafts : If you had any drafts in your MovableType blog, you can edit them only if you are logged in as the author of the draft. Logout if you are logged in as admin, or some other user, and use information from step 4.a. to login and edit those drafts, or to publish them.
  3. Google/Other Search Engines : Search Engines will continue referring searchers to your old MovableType pages.To redirect them to your WordPress entries, you can use Alex King's MovableType template to redirect visitors, or with Matt's Solution.

This tutorial has been tried and tested using MovableType V 2.63 and WordPress 1.0.2