The obviously critical part of converting this site over to Octopress was importing my existing Movable Type Posts. There is a Jekyll script that is supposed to do this, but I have not used it. Poking around the net, I saw a post about someone using an archive template to export Expression Engine posts into Movable Type.

Well, MT has archive templates and I thought I could certainly do the reverse and export my entries out of MT into markdown files with the correct YAML metadata.

Here is the Archive Template I built—I called it OctoExport:

---
layout: post  
title: "<$mt:EntryTitle$>"  
date: <$mt:EntryDate format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M"$>  
comments: true  
categories: <$mt:EntryCategory$>  
---

<$mt:EntryBody convert_breaks="0" $>​

Pretty self-explanatory, but a few notes are in order to make this work correctly. First, I set the format attribute of the mt:EntryDate tag to match what Octopress is expecting in that field. The convert_breaks="0" attribute is important. It tells MT to perform no conversion on the entry text, i.e. export it in the markdown format that I wrote it in. Without it, the Entry Body will be exported converted to HTML.

Also, If you have any MT entries that are split between EntryBody and EntryIfExtended (with the accompanying “Continue reading…” link), include that tag as well. I have never used that, so I left it out.

The other key part of this is setting the Archive Mapping of this template to export with the correct filename structure that Octopress is looking for:

2012-08-07-a-markdown-test-entry.markdown

After creating the template, go back to the Template Options and create a new Entry mapping¹. Select Custom from the drop down menu and enter this:

%y-%m-%d-%F.markdown 

The year-month-day is obvious, although the values are case-sensitive. The %F is a place-holder for the original filename, and using an uppercase ‘F’ means to drop the original extension (.html) so I can add my own (.markdown). This placeholder also replaces spaces between words with underscores. Use %-F (note the hyphen) to use hyphens. Read the MT documentation for all possible file path options. I used the former because my original MT entries are published with the following URL structure:

http://www.nealsheeran.com/archives/2012/07/some_post.html

And I want Octopress URLs to do be as close as possible to minimize .htaccess pain later on. If I could go back in time, I would have used hyphens and a slug length longer than 30 characters.

Once complete, I hit ‘Publish’ and in less than a minute I had 121 markdown files of all my MT entries ². Using my PGP post from last month as an example, here is the name of the markdown file that this archive template created:

2012-07-12-pgp.markdown

And here is it’s contents:

---
layout: post  
title: "PGP"  
date: 2012-07-12 00:18  
comments: true  
categories: Software  
---

I came across [this article][1] about Phil Zimmerman...

Some Notes Regarding Categories:

1. If you have assigned multiple categories to a post, MT will list them separated by commas after categories:, whereas Octopress needs them to be also enclosed in brackets.

2. Octopress needs multi-word categories to be enclosed in single or double quotes.

For example, if Movable Type exports this:

categories: Current Events, Software

Octopress needs this:

categories: ['Current Events', Software]

Some grep-foo with BBEdit can easily take care of these issues. Of course, I say that like I knew what I was doing. Not quite.

I still went through each file and double-check image paths, links or any posts that were written in HTML as opposed to markdown. MT’s basic markdown parser doesn’t understand more advanced syntax (such as Multi-Markdown) that provides footnotes. When I wrote a post with footnotes–usually with nvALT and previewed with Marked–I changed Marked to display the generated HTML and then pasted that into MarsEdit.

I haven’t been very diligent about setting the right categories (or tags) in the past, so I went back through the resulting files before I generated them with Octopress.

Redirecting Old MT Posts

Under Movable Type, individual entry URLs were structured like so:

http://www.nealsheeran.com/archives/2012/07/some_post.html

Using the above export template to export the original slug as the title, and modifying the the permalink setting in my Octopress config.yml file to:

permalink: /archives/:year/:month/:title/

Will result in Octopress posts living at:

http://www.nealsheeran.com/archives/2012/07/some_post/

I made the following entry to my root .htaccess file to redirect the old MT URLs to the new location:

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(archives/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2})/(.*)\.html$ /$1/$2/ [R]

I’m no regex nerd, but the key part here is capturing the file name of the original URL (the some_post, with (.*)) without the the html extension and passing that as a variable ($2) for the the final destination folder of the new URL. Yes, I’m sure there are better ways to write the regex, but it works for me, and makes sense when I go back and look at it later.