Moving from Typepad to Wordpress - How To ( Part 1 )

In the last post on Moving from Typepad to Wordpress, I gave the outline of pains of migrating from Typepad to Wordpress. Lets continue where I left in the last post.

Lets talk about the following 5 issues and how I solved them here.

1. Typepad uses short weired urls’s for each post while Wordpress uses SEO friendly URL’s
2. Typepad adds .html at the end of each URL while Wordpress doesn’t
3. Typepad blog name is problematic ‘myblogingsite.typepad.com/blog1’ - the second part ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ after the slash in the URL host name is the name you choose when you were setting up your blog on Typepad.
4. All the links in blog posts before I mapped my Typepad blog to my own custom domain name, still point to Typepad.com
5. All the file links and logo links are still pointing to typepad.com

1. Typepad uses short wiered urls’s for each post while Wordpress uses SEO friendly URL’s

Lets take an example for a post, url generated by Typepad is ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/gps_that_never_.html’ while this post is imported in Wordpress, the URL generated by Wordpress would be ‘http:// hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/18/gps-that-never-fails/’ provided that permalinks are enabled in Wordpress. That is where wordpress slug feature comes to the rescue. Wordpress lets you manually assign a post slug to any post, which overrides automatically Wordpress generated SEO friendly post slug.

However, you have to manually open each post in wordpress and assign it a post slug manually. I copied the old Typepad post slug ‘gps_that_never_’ in the Post slug box on the post management page. Now the URL generated by Wordpress was ‘http:// hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/18/gps_that_never_/’. Looks like that we are getting closer.

2. Typepad adds .html at the end of each URL while Wordpress doesn’t

Next step is adding .html at the end of all URL’s automatically and getting rid of that last ‘/’. Also in the posts URL structure Typepad is using /Year/Month/ while the default for Wordpress is /Year/Month/Day/, so will be dropping this /Day part from the URL generation as well.

We can achieve this simply by configuring the Wordpress’s permalink generating structure and customizing it. Tell Wordpress to generate custom structure using the following string ‘/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html’. We have done 3 things here. We have removed the /%day% , added the .html to the end of each URL and removed the postfix ‘/’ from each URL.

After updating the Permalink structure, now the finished URL is ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007/06/gps_that_never_.html’ - Hurray, this is what we wanted.

3. Typepad blog name is problematic ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley’ - the second part ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ after the ‘/’ in the URL host name is the name you choose when you were setting up your blog on Typepad.

Solution for this is very simple. I simple choose to install the Typepad software in a subdirectory named ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ instead of installing in the root web directory and that did the trick because automatically ads the subdirectory name as part of the URL.

Another way this problem could have been solved would be by modifying the permalink custom structure in Wordpress, if you had installed the wordpress in the web root directory of the server. The Custom Structure for permalinks would be ‘/hotfromsiliconvalley/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html’, and that will inject ‘hotfromsiliconvalley’ after hostname in the URL.

4. All the links in blog posts before I mapped my Typepad blog to my own custom domain name, still point to Typepad.com

For this the solution is a search and replace operation on the text file which was exported by Typepad. You have to this before you import this file in Wordpress. In your favorite text editor search for ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.typepad.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007’ and replace it with ‘http://hotfromsiliconvalley.com/hotfromsiliconvalley/2007’ throughout the document and that should do the trick. Repeat the same for all with the other years 2006, 2005 and so on. This ensures the image URL’s are not automatically replaced in this operation and they will continue to point to Typepad, which we can replace next.

To be continued in next post…