RobWorley.com running WordPress 1

So, I finally upgraded my blog software this weekend.

RobWorley.com had been running b2evolution for the past five years. It’s a swell bit of software. When I settled on it back in the day it was one of two projects that grew up from the remains of the previous open source blogging favorite cafelog’s b2. The other project was WordPress.

Since then WordPress has caught fire. An amazing support community sprung up around it. It has a huge repository of plugins, widgets and themes. I had occasion to install WP on another blog I was setting up and I was hooked pretty quickly.

In addition to the great community, it has the best back office interface I’ve ever seen in a CMS, and I’ve toyed with a lot of Content Management Systems: Joomla, Drupal, Silverstripe, Typad, Typo not to mention a number of custom coded ones. The  back end is clean, easy to navigate, easy to understand without the need for instructions.

One nice feature is a automatic upgrade mechanism. Upgrading open source web software is the bane of any website’s existence. With my site running a tag team of b2evo and ZenPhoto.org I was in a constant cycle of downloading updates, tweaking config files, backing up, uploading, reinstalling, blah blah blah. With WordPress you can update the core software and any plugins you might be running by clicking through a couple of screens and it’s done.

There was no clear path to migrate from b2evo to WordPress. WordPress supports numerous imports, but b2evo isn’t one of them. I did find solutions described elsewhere online though. If you’re  interested in moving, here’s the process I used:

1. Find a skin for your version of b2evo that makes it output Moveable Type format. I found such a skin here, although I think it is for pre version 2.0 installs. I didn’t work for me because I was on version 2.3. However I was able to modify it so it worked fine with version 2.3. If you’re on 2.x it may work for you as well. If you’re on 3.x it probably won’t. Download the Movable Type Skin for b2evolution…
2. If you’re using my MT skin, you’ll then have to put it on your b2evo install under the /skins folder.
3. Run your blog with the MT skin. You can use a URL like: http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?tempskin=mt&posts=9999999999999 – which should bring up all your posts and comments in an ugly looking format. Save the results to a text file.
4. Install WordPress on your server.
5. Use Tools->Import and follow the steps for importing a Moveable Type blog. It works amazingly well.

One HUGE mistake I made was to install the Tweetly plugin before doing the import. Tweetly posts a tweet on Twitter every time you post a new blog. It ended up tweeting for every single entry I imported. It’s a wonder I still have a Twitter account.

I’ve decided to do away with ZenPhoto as well. It’s a cool, lightweight gallery but I’m moving my stuff to Flickr mainly to avoid the upgrade cycle, and also because I couldn’t get the one good ZenPhoto plugin for WordPress to work.

There are numerous nice Flickr plugins available. The move was pretty painless as Flickr has nice uploading tools.

So there you go…RobWorley.com is all pimped out with WordPress and automatically hooked into twitter, facebook and flickr.

Which is cool, because I’ll have some interesting info about an upcoming project to blog about soon.