MacDailyNews moves from EE to WP

The latest blogpost on the WordPress Publisher Blog tells the news of the high profile migration of MacDailyNews from ExpressionEngine to WordPress VIP:

MacDailyNews migrates from EE to WP

To quote the blogpost:

“With an archive dating back to 2002 and over 750,000 comments, this is the largest Expression Engine² migration to date. MacDailyNews brings with them a very active community and an ever-burning desire to publish.”

It made me think of a specific moment last friday. I was eating breakfast in a cabin in the mountains of Norway, listening to the radio – the breaking news being the Nokia & Microsoft partnership, but – and isn’t technology beautiful – I was also reading this blogpost on my mobile:

In it, Byrne Reese the former Product Manager of Movable Type and TypePad at Six Apart lays out specific reasons he thinks contributed to WordPress winning the “blog wars” over MovableType.

Tactic: Migrate, then blog the hell out of it

Here’s one of the main reasons he lists:

One thing rarely cited by the outside world, probably because it was not visible or apparent to anyone, was the systematic targeting of high profile brands to switch from using any competing platform to using WordPress. In fact, in the four years I was at Six Apart, if I had a dollar every time a significant and loyal TypePad and Movable Type customer confided in me that an employee of Automattic cold called them to encourage and entice them to switch to WordPress I would have quit a rich man. Automattic would extend whatever services it could, at no expense to the customer, getting them to switch. They would give away hosting services. They would freely dedicate engineers to the task of migrating customers’ data from one system to another. They would do whatever it took to move people to WordPress.

And once a migration was complete they did the single most important thing: they blogged the hell out of it.

(emphasis mine)

Read the entire blogpost here, it’s quite interesting (and well written).

So, it could seem that Automattic is pulling old tricks on EllisLab. However, a quick google shows that there hasn’t been much mention of ExpressionEngine on the publisher blog until now. Also, it’s not the same situation as back in the days when MovableType and WordPress were equally popular.

Nonetheless …

What do you think?

• Is Automattic using the same tactics on EllisLab that they were using earlier on Six Apart?
• Will we see more of these blogposts from Automattic as ExpressionEngine grows in popularity?
• Or is ExpressionEngine simply too small for them to even bother?
• Will ExpressionEngine suffer the same “fate” as MovableType?

First off, the WordPress export / import tool works like a charm[1]. Second, I wrote a simple .htaccess to forward everything to an index.php which then again redirects everything (including the query string) to the new url. That means bie.no/category/blog-post-here for example will be redirected to bybjorn.com/category/blog-post-here .. and WordPress is smart enough to understand the original link-format, and then redirect to the new one I’ve chosen for this blog. So the user will end up on bybjorn.com/10, all incoming links work and all link-juice transferred (using 301 redirects).

index.php:

 header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
 $i = $_GET['i']; if($i != "") {$location = "http://www.bybjorn.com/" . $i;
 } else { $location = "http://www.bybjorn.com/";}
 header ('Location: '.$location);

.htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?i=$1 [L]

Here’s the process in easy to understand list-format;

1. Install WordPress on the new location
2. Use WordPress’ built in export tool to do a full export of your original blog
3. Upload the export file and use the same tool in the WordPress admin to import the data to the new blog
4. Download and activate any plugins you had on your original blog (akismet, textile, etc)
5. May be the case: go through all the blogposts and fix direct links to files etc. you have posted on your old domain (if such exists)
6. Delete your old blog, and upload this new index.php and this .htaccess

Enjoy!

[1] (unless you have large amounts of data)

It turns out my WP install was hacked and the content here was replaced by lots of spam links. I don’t know how to get the content back (unless it was indexed somewhere, took a quick google but didn’t find anything) .. Oh, the irony.