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As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’ve recently transferred this site over to using ExpressionEngine (EE) from WordPress. WordPress is an excellent tool, but if you want to do a bit more then EE is really superb. The templating system takes a little while to get your head around (not that it’s particularly difficult, it just does things a little bit differently), but once you have, there’s more or less no end to what you can do. In the process of rebuilding this site, I’ve frequently thought, “I wonder if I can do this…” and found that I can. EE has enormous flexibility, with ‘weblogs’ which are just containers for data, and can be displayed in any way you choose. One of the things I initially worried about was whether I could replicate the domain structure of my old site so that old permalinks could be redirected, or would just work. I found (after a few questions on the support forum), that EE could be installed in a subdirectory of my web root, but if I copied a couple of files into the webroot, that subdirectory would not need to appear in the URL. Then I could just name template groups appropriately to form what would appear to be subdirectories of the main domain (/blog, /wingsopenwide etc.)—nifty. An .htaccess rule (again, a solution provided by the support forum) transforms the old permalinks to individual articles (which had the article date in them) into the new /blog/archives/entry-title format.

I thought I’d document the process I went through in a little more detail—partly so that I don’t forget what I did, but also in case anyone else is trying to solve similar problems:

• Importing the old entries and comments using WPExport
• Translating the templates
• Setting up the structure of the site
• Using the gallery to replace the old Wings Open Wide photoblog
• Entry Linker plugin
• Using phpThumb to dynamically generate thumbnails
• Creating the Media blog
• Setting up a dynamic link list via NewsGator

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