mconstan

I can see why a client my have aprehension about dyanimc pages. While WordPress and many blogs packages produce good quality, concise HTML and URL’s (espeically if you use SEF URL’s), this hasn’t been the case with many of the old school content management systems.
So maybe the problem lies more in the quality of HTML produced rather than the static/dynamic aspect of it. If you can show that the HTML and URLs are just as concise as hand-coded pages, then the problem will go away.

Ah, no responses. Well…. for the benefit of everyone else traveling this route, here’s some hints.
I found out that the Movable Type import handles comments but the blogger one doesn’t. So I scoured the net for a blogger to mt template. Most didn’t support comments. The one below, does (sort of).
I found it on hitormiss.org. Except I added the “STATUS: Publish” line (important).

<Blogger>
TITLE: <BlogItemTitle><BlogItemURL>\"></BlogItemURL><$BlogItemTitle$></BlogItemTitle>
AUTHOR: <$BlogItemAuthor$>
DATE: <$BlogItemDateTime$>
STATUS: Publish
-----
BODY:
<$BlogItemBody$>
-----
<BlogItemCommentsEnabled><BlogItemComments>COMMENT:
AUTHOR: <$BlogCommentAuthor$>
DATE: <$BlogCommentDateTime$>
<$BlogCommentBody$>
-----</BlogItemComments></BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
--------</Blogger>

Follow the blogger export instructions at Movable Type, but use the above template instead.
Once you have your export file. You’ll need to do some manual cleanup. You have to remove all the email addresses from around your comment names. I did that using a regular expression in dreamweaver. If you want to keep those email addresses, then you’re on your own to figure that one out. I decided to ditch mine but I may try to add them in later somehow.
You’ll also need to make sure there’s a linefeed after any of the dashed lines. Somehow on my export, many of the comments were missing a linefeed after the dashes. (important note: don’t change the number of dashes).
I also had some stray closing ‘a’ tags that I needed to delete.
After that I followed the instructions for importing MoveableType comments into WP, and I was all set, comments and all.
Only thing I didn’t clean up was that, for some reason on posts without comments, there were some spare dashes floating around at the bottom of the post. Oh well.
It took me a few tries to get all of this right. I messed up a few times and had to empty my post, post2cat, and comments tables a few times. If you do that, take the proper precautions and backup your data.
I hope that helps.
-Matt