Converting from Moveable Type to Wordpress

I am currently using moveable type and wanted to get input on changing over

[Steelbank]

All CMS experts.

For the past 7 years, I have been using moveabletype for my content management software. My website, which is in a highly competitive niche market has had great results in the SERP's over the past few years.

We have over 2000 pages of unique content, unique URL's and once again ideal positioning.

My biggest issue is that moveabletype is not as flexible and userfriendly as the new Wordpress software. Moveable Type crashes on almost every single rebuild, and does not provide for the add-ons that Wordpress does.

My questions to anyone with experience in changing CMS, is what are the advantages/disadvantages of moving everything over to a Wordpress system? Is it possible to do this without causing too much harm?

[ergophobe]

I've moved from Nucleus to WP, but it was a low-risk transfer, meaning that the site was of no commercial value and didn't rank for anything, so I just moved it. Generally speaking, the hard part is the little stuff - getting images and other media in the right place, getting all tags and URLs to work correctly, user permissions and so forth.

In general, if I have to do something like you're talking about, I would

- set up a testbed server on a local machine

- write the script or set of scripts that will get the data from one system to the other (this is probably done somewhere already for the MT to WP conversion).

- test locally for a while and see what pitfalls I see. Try to break it. I'm going to throw away this data anyway. Keep records of any little things that have to fixed and make those part of your transfer procedure.

- lock the old system to new content, including comments

- get everything uploaded onto the live server. If you're serving from public_html, upload to public_html_new. You could run it on a subdomain like new.example.com, but if your testbed server mirrors your live server environment, you can actually test more real conditions (set up your local machine with a virtual host with the same domain name, e.g. example.com so that everything is as close as possible to the live server. Remember, you'll have to change this setting if you want to access a non-local example.com address).

- when you're ready to test, rename public_html to public_html_old and rename public_html_new to public_html. You're live. Do some last tests. Uh, something wrong? Change the names back and go back to testing.

[bill]

<slightly OT>

Moveable Type crashes on almost every single rebuild

SixApart provides some great back end support for a reasonable fee. You might want to get them to look at the issues you're having with that. I've even had them go onto my server and fix things. You won't get that level of support for WP.

[ergophobe]

Unless of course you have it hosted at wordpress.com - then you can complain if it crashes constantly. The data import might be a challenge though.