It has been a long time coming but I have finally got around to upgrading my blog software and I chose to switch from BlogCFC to Mangoblog, which thankfully was a pretty painless expereince. My main reason for wanting to upgrade was to stop comment spam, which I have been getting a lot of as my version of BlogCFC has no way to stop this.
The last time I looked at doing this there was no easy solution, I of course looked at updating to the latest BlogCFC, but this turned out to be the most complicated solution of all, as I would have needed to apply a lot of old incremental updates first and do a lot of manual work, so I dismissed this option. So I looked at Mangoblog which I have used on cfmldeveloper and really liked, but there was no easy upgrade route there either.
So I then decided if I was going to have to do this much work then I may as well move to Wordpress which I have really come to regard as the mother of all blogging software and then some. I had made a good start on this several months ago, I had Wordpress installed, chose a theme, got all the config done, all I needed to do was write some scripts to import all my blog posts and comments. However when I next looked at my Wordpress site several months later the permalinks had broken and I could not get them working again, so I got pissed off and decided to give Mangoblog another look.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the current version had an import tool for blogCFC 5.x, I had my doubts it would work but thought I would give it a go.
Well I am happy to report that the import tool did work, flawlessly, which was good considering I did have a very old version of BlogCFC (5.5), it imported all my posts, all the comments and categories. However it is not perfect as it did not import blog subscribers or comment subscriptions and did nothing at all with images in posts, so all the img url's remained the same.
This is not such a big deal as I don't really care about comments on old posts and a simple post on my old blog advising readers of the new URL will get them to update. The image issue is also easy to resolve, you can either:-
a) copy the folder that contained your images over form your old blog to the new blog.
b) do some url rewriting to redirect the image requests to the old url.
As my old blog is actually just a sub-directory inside michaels.me.uk and I will be keeping it running for a while until Google indexes the new one, I chose option b, and here is the rewrite rule in case your interested (I use Isapi_Rewrite on IIS btw).
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^images/(.+) russ/images/$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^enclosures/(.+) russ/enclosures/$1 [QSA]
And here is the rule on my old blog to redirect the RSS feed
RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^rss.cfm http://www.michaels.me.uk/feeds/rss.cfm [QSA]
If you have any custom CSS for formatting CODE blocks and the like then you will also need to copy this across as well.
As I mentioned I have used BlogCFC before and here are just 2 of the cool Wordpress type features I really like about MangoBlog .
- Extensible with plugins
- Themes , it is also very easy to skin or modify existing themes.
One other thing I like is that Mangoblog generally won't bomb if there is an error, the component or plugin will fail gracefully and the error will be logged.
Jun 3, 2011 at 4:41 PM Dig the new header on your blog. Commodore 64...brings back fond memories (where is my cassette tape with all my games???)