Musings @musicandmeaning.com

See, I've only had a photograph to drag around.
"He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood." – E. M. Forster

Archive for March 5th, 2005


Saturday, 5 March 2005

Migration to WordPress 1.5 complete

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s finally done. It took me long enough, but I have switched this, my main blog, to WP 1.5. The installations of WP have been fairly simpler than my experiences with Movable Type. I had no problems upgrading from 1.2.x to 1.5, or installing a fresh 1.5. The time consuming aspect is having to re-learn a completely new system. The tags are different, the protocol is different (I didn’t know anything about PHP), and the templates are different. I’ve played with earlier versions of WP before, but Strayhorn has many more features. It took me a very long time to figure out how not to break the PHP (which I did a few times while I modified the templates), but I’m still not sure how to do certain things.

Wrestling with the templates and getting everything to look right on the pages with CSS and the WP tags took me a few days. I couldn’t have done it without the scattered help out there — thankfully, there’s a ton of more documentation (official and otherwise) now, compared to when I first installed WP about a year ago (a very empty Wiki). As time progresses, I hope to post more about this latest migration experience, and to specifically mention the blogs and other sites that helped me along the way.

Some things post-migration:

The site still has some display quirks that I need to iron out if I want to make the blog more user-friendly. Some of that involves the PHP end of things (figuring out how to modify some navigation, for one thing), so it depends on how long it takes me to learn. The most obvious thing you may notice will be the weird line breaks on some of the archived posts. MT had an auto line break toggle, but WP does not. So the posts that did not use the auto line break feature in MT — well, now they have breaks in strange places. I remember reading about this a while back. I hope I can find some way to fix those posts without having to go through each one manually…then again, that may be my only option. It shouldn’t take that long. We’ll see.

The URI for the XML feed has changed, so if you subscribe to musings that way, please update ( http://www.musicandmeaning.com/site/musings/feed/ ). I’ve set up redirects for the old link. For now, the new feed is enhanced through FeedBurner, and apparently will be compatible for all readers.

That’s about it. Comments should work, although I’ve shut off trackbacks for now. Let me know if something doesn’t work.

So my brief review so far: WP 1.5 is pretty nice — there are some very cool features, e.g. non-date-based pages and the new templates. It just took me a while to figure everything out. I’m sure I’ll have a better idea of the WP vs. MT aspects after I’ve spent some more time posting and managing.

Posted at 9:54 am | Filed under WordPress |