I’m planning on migrating this site to a new platform soon, I’ve been looking around for an alternative to textpattern. Textpattern has been great but I’ve kind of outgrown it. Its easy to use but a bit “fluffy” and it eats my code excerpts which is really annoying.

I’ve picked serendipity as my intended target, its very modular and uses smarty for templating which I like and am familiar with. And if its good enough for sara and davey then I expect I will get along with it just fine.

Meeting Serendipity

So I installed Serendipity, nice easy installer, and started to look in the admin panel. There was a button for “Import Data” … you say what kind of blog platform you are coming from, and enter your database credentials and it attempts to import your old data. So I kind of tapped in my details.

Literally five seconds later I was looking at a blog with my entire history in it. Its got comments, posts, categories and users. I’m blown away, its utterly fantastic.

Finishing touches

The import didn’t cover stuff like images, which will need a whole series of conversions and text replacement on the posts to get sorted, and it seems to have chewed on some HTML entities. Also textpattern uses a post body with an optional excerpt and serendipity uses post body with optional extended body which has done some weird things to the import. It doesn’t help that I did use excerpts for a while in textpattern and then stopped after complaints from people reading on feed readers.

I’m also procrastinating over a theme for the new site … obviously it will involve a very empty stylesheet and at least two shades of pink but I’m not quite there with it yet. Once I’ve converted my content then I’ll just stop fiddling and use what I’ve got I think. I’ll also post the conversion scripts once I’ve finished with them.

Finally I will have to put together a bunch of HTTP 301’s since serendipity won’t support having article titles as the only thing after the domain name on the URL. I’ll keep you posted :)