Eshin Direct

Move to WordPress

As you can obviously see, I’m updating the site to accomodate WordPress vs. pMachine. So bear with me while things look a little Frankensteinish.

I was on pMachine Pro 2.3 and apparently it was no longer going to be supported by pMachine, the design team instead focusing their energy on ExpressionEngine. I decided to make the switch to WordPress, having had somewhat pleasant experiences with it on other blogs I’ve designed. Incidentally, EE and WordPress look very similar in terms of backend interface (although EE is probably still a lot slicker as a “blog” tool – but you pay for the privilege).

How did I do the conversion? Betalogue provides an excellent how-to in his post “From pMachine to WordPress” post.

Bear in mind, you have to run the PHP script referred to for each weblog you have in pM Pro. Look for the line:

$pmachine_blog_id = 1;

and change this to the weblog id for your various different blogs. You might find it somewhere else, but I found it in the MySQL tables listed under the pm_ tables for multiblogs. Oh yeah, don’t forget to add in your pMachine db settings in the PHP script. This did return a number of different errors which I heathily ignored.

What you do need to bear in mind is that running multiple instances of the script for your different weblogs in pM Pro will “erase” the default category for posts (or category id 1). Most of my posts were in this default category (usually the first category, of the first blog). It was a simple thing, once I’d finished running the PHP script for each weblog, to add in a row in phpMyAdmin to the wp_categories table which simply added category id 1 and the name for the category (in my case Diary).

Also, you’ll need to go into wp_users and change the admin user ID from 0 to 1, in case it’s jumped. If you don’t, your WordPress blog will present edit functions to the world, and not recognise you when you want to leave a comment to your own posts (as admin). Incidentally, the users from pM to WordPress were not correctly ported. This didn’t really matter for me, but it might for someone else.