Cynical Nation

Almost no one will care about this post, so please feel free to ignore it before you read any further. It describes a solution I found for an annoying bug in Moveable Type's web publishing software. I'm posting it here because I'm sure there are others out there who will struggle with the same problem, so hopefully they can find the solution here through some quick Googling.

So anyway, I was porting my blog to a different server, using MoveableType's import/export routines to transfer all my posts. The import/export feature worked great... except for the fact that it did not preserve entry IDs. When the old posts were brought into the new site, they were assigned an entry ID rather arbitrarily, via an auto-increment function. Generally speaking, all my posts were now assigned a different entry ID than they had on the old site. A consequence of this is that it broke essentially every link to my site that exists on the Internet. That is not good.

Fortunately, a fix proved to be pretty easy. So easy, in fact, that it's astonishing that Movable Type hasn't incorporated it into its more recent versions. Anyway, here's how you go about doing it. The good thing about Movable Type is that you get all the source code for it, so that you can hack it in cool ways like this.

First you have to fix the export routine on your old MT installation. Find the CMS.pm library file (usually located in the App directory under lib) and get ready to add a couple of lines of code. Don't pay much attention to the lines numbers here, because those will vary from version to version. Find a place in the code that looks something like this:

   2959 AUTHOR: <$MTEntryAuthor$>

   2960 TITLE: <$MTEntryTitle$>

   2961 STATUS: <$MTEntryStatus$>

   2962 ALLOW COMMENTS: <$MTEntryFlag flag="allow_comments"$>

   2963 CONVERT BREAKS: <$MTEntryFlag flag="convert_breaks"$>

   2964 ALLOW PINGS: <$MTEntryFlag flag="allow_pings"$>

   2965 PRIMARY CATEGORY: <$MTEntryCategory$>

   2959 AUTHOR: <$MTEntryAuthor$>

   2960 ID: <$MTEntryID$>

   2961 TITLE: <$MTEntryTitle$>

   2962 STATUS: <$MTEntryStatus$>

   2963 ALLOW COMMENTS: <$MTEntryFlag flag="allow_comments"$>

   2964 CONVERT BREAKS: <$MTEntryFlag flag="convert_breaks"$>

   2965 ALLOW PINGS: <$MTEntryFlag flag="allow_pings"$>

   2966 PRIMARY CATEGORY: <$MTEntryCategory$>

Now go to the MT installation on the new server and edit the same file, CMS.pm. Find the following chunk of code:

   7446                     } elsif ($key eq 'TITLE') {

   7447                         $entry->title($val);

   7448                     } elsif ($key eq 'DATE') {

   7449                         my $date = $app->_convert_date($val) or return;

   7450                         $entry->created_on($date);

   7446                     } elsif ($key eq 'TITLE') {

   7447                         $entry->title($val);

   7448                     } elsif ($key eq 'ID') {            

   7449                         $entry->id($val);              

   7450                     } elsif ($key eq 'DATE') {

   7451                         my $date = $app->_convert_date($val) or return;

   7452                         $entry->created_on($date);