SUCCESS STORY OF A CONVERSION FROM BLOGSPOT TO WORDPRESS

[UPDATE March 2006 ———— ]

This little article has been quite popular among the people stuck in Blogger without Categories. I truly wish I had kept a diary of each and every little tweak and step I had to take to get my blog transferred over and organized. I’m sorry I can’t give you the step by step folks, I’ve forgotten all the little things I did.

See the Comments for some discussion of URL and Webhosting stuff.

See also another BIG Wordpress conversion I’m doing:
Converting a business website from old-fashioned HTML to Wordpress.

See also My brief story of the painless upgrade of Radmod.com from WP 1.51 to WP 2.01

HERE’S A FEW BIG TIPS:

• The Wordpress FAQ on transferring Blogger Posts worked for me. Follow the directions exactly, as I did.
• Follow the Wordpress FAQs and the Wordpress Codex. The info is generally reliable and quite detailed.
• Use the Default Wordpress Theme at first, until you get all your posts transferred, and get all your Plugins working.
• If you want to use a lot of cool plugins, be very conservative about your Theme. Themes often break plugins or require that plugins be tweaked to fit into the themes. I bet most plugins work with the Default Theme right out of the box.

  In order to get plugins working with custom themes, you might have to learn more about coding and PHP than you are prepared for.

  And if you’re really wacko like me, you’ll radically alter a well designed theme, so that you can’t even update your site to the latest Wordpress version without destroying the delicately interacting highly tweaked code. [UPDATE - 3-2-06 — I upgraded to WP 2.01 from WP 1.51 and had NO trouble at all. I guess the tweaks I made, while extensive, were all confined to the Theme - related files. I guess I didn’t tweak the core Wordpress files at all. I thought I did tweak some functions, but guess I didn’t after all. When upgrading, you keep your same old theme, with the same old plugins. Unless a major function changes (between versions) in the core Wordpress files, everything should work the same.]

  Stick with the Default Theme unless you’re a pro or willing to learn a WHOLE lot.

[END OF UPDATE, now back to the pre-March 2006 text, with a few little Updates thrown in here and there]

———-

Check out The Radical Moderate - WORDPRESS version - - - - Compare The Radical Moderate - BLOGSPOT version

For other WordPress newbies out there, I have ported over a blog from Blogspot, loaded all posts into Wordpress, put them all into categories, dramatically altered a Theme to display what I wanted, found some great plugins and tweaked them to fit within my theme.

Mostly, I think my new blog site looks ok (not artistic but functional), but more importantly, my new blog DOES WHAT I WANT !

I have Wordpress 1.5 (I have NOT updated to 1.51). [UPDATE —- as of 3-2-06 I HAVE upgraded to WP 2.01

THEME:
I used the Journalized Winter theme from Mike Little. I “radically” altered it tho. Mike would be offended if he ever saw how I butchered his theme, and he’d ask me to remove the Credit, so don’t anyone tell him about it, ok?

PLUGINS:
My plugin list includes plugins that I’ve deactivated due to some issue, or plugins that actually broke completely at some point. I am mentioning those defunct (for me) plugins, just to let you know that you aren’t alone if you have plugin trouble. Sometimes the critters just stop working, due to a change you make, and you can’t get them working again, and it isn’t worth the trouble to spend 50 hours in intense study of PHP to figure out what went wrong.

Most of the plugins I use had to be substantailly tweaked to fit within my custom theme. I especially tweaked them to display customized language to the visitor, rather than the default plugin interface messages.

Spend time on the Wordpress message boards and the Plugin-Author’s own websites, and study as much as possible about the plugins before you try to install them. It’ll save you a lot of trouble.

My Plugins ————

• Customizable post listings.
• Next-post previous-post same category.
• DC Nicer Archives. The hardest plugin to get working was probably “DC Nicer Archives”. Installation instructions are not helpful unless you use the Default WordPress theme (and I don’t).
• WP Paginate. UPDATE: A sudden problem occurred and WP Paginate started returning 404s when the “page 2″ links etc were clicked, so I removed the code calling for the display of the pagination prompts. I’ve got to figure out what broke this nice plugin.
• Enhanced Views. [Now Deactivated]
• WP-Print.
• Paged Comment Editing - installed beautifully
• Enhanced Post List - installed beautifully

CONCLUSION:
I tell you the above because I want to reassure you — IT CAN BE DONE !!!

In the process of learning how to tweak WordPress, I have also started the process of building a WordPress version of my main website Tim’s Missouri Employment Law - www.TimsLaw.com. Right now, TimsLaw.com remains static html files. But I am coding a WordPress version right now, for easy updates and categorization, etc — content management by WordPress is on the horizon !!!.

[UPDATE — The process of converting my main HTML website, www.TimsLaw.com, over to Wordpress was so conceptually hard for me that I stopped working on it, never got off the ground with starting on the conversion really. But in late Feb 2006 I started the conversion again. Big issue: Deciding whether to transfer my html articles into Blog Posts or Pages in Wordpress. Another issue: What to do about all the interlinking between my html pages? Somehow I gotta fix all the links now. Another: How to get a Wordpress site to look like my html site - wow the tweaking is outrageous and will prevent easy updates to the site code as new versions get released?]