Textpattern CMS

#1 2010-02-10 09:21:08

rlube

New Member

Registered: 2010-02-10

Posts: 4

Successful migration from Old Blogger, except RSS

With Google Blogger now discontinuing publishing by FTP, I’m migrating my blog to be powered by Textpattern. I’m still working on a localhost, but so far the redevelopment has been a good experience. Even though I’m still using Old Blogger with an ancient template, my objective is to retain the look and all functionality as it is. I don’t have time or inclination for a redesign right now.

I am very pleased to report that few would detect that I’ve shifted across unless I tell them, or they notice the new powered by badge. The template translated perfectly into Txp’s pages and forms, using the same style sheet. I was impressed at how completely the function tags mapped across. It’s quite uncanny.

Importantly, I wanted to retain the domain/year/month/title permlinks from Blogger so that I don’t break links from others. This was incredibly easy to do with the gbp_permanent_links plugin. Many thanks to Graeme for continuing to support it.

My 300+ posts and their comments going back to 2005 have imported beautifully using the prescribed procedure. I was able to do some quick editing directly on the import file to kill some rubbish related to Blogger. I figured out how to get commenting to work nicely through the preview submission. I’ve also got search working even better than before embedded locally in Txp rather than through Google.

So I’m almost there, ready to shift it to the live site. (If you read this post later, and click the link above, you should get the migrated site.) But there’s one thing left, and I finally have to ask for help.

I have a few blog followers and would prefer to not change the RSS feed url. Blogger uses the files rss.xml and atom.xml in the root folder. Txp references it as an index.php search string ?rss=1 or ?atom=1 respectively. I want the former to map to the latter. Because I’m not live, I’m just testing the feed urls offered by entering them directly into the Firefox, or rolling over the feed icon. Txp’s feed url is taking me to my Bloglines, but not finding a feed.

I’ve been trying to edit the .htaccess file in the same folder as the textpattern subfolder. Note that for development I’m one folder level down in my xampp setup. (eg. the blog home loads as localhost/deliberations/) But all I seem to be able to do is kill blog access completely :-(

Can anybody experienced with .htaccess suggest how to do this? And not upset gbp_permanent_links? I’m happy to answer questions to confirm what’s (not) happening so far.

—Ron.

#2 2010-02-11 07:08:56

rlube

New Member

Registered: 2010-02-10

Posts: 4

Re: Successful migration from Old Blogger, except RSS

Okay, I’m live. Using the htaccess shown here

I’d also like to note that I altered the import procedure from Blogger. The saved urls that Blogger uses are limited to about 40 characters and omit articles (the, a, an) from the titles. Rather than try to replicate that logic, I thought I’d import both the real title and the url_title. So I added a SLUG line to the export format. And changed the import logic to get that item separately.

So far, Textpattern is doing the right thing by me!