• Sandbox theme competion winners (Aug 2007)
• 10 fresh, elegant and clean ones from Smashing Magazine (May 2007)
• 21 more from Smashing Magazine (Jun 2007)
• another 83 from Smashing (Feb 2007)
• A list from TechRoam (Nov 2006)
• The best minimalist WordPress themes (plaintxt.org, Jun 2006)

• How Wordpress works, convert static html to a WordPress template. Good introduction if you are migrating from Blosxom
• Dissecting WordPress permalinks
• The top five ways of keeping your WordPress valid
• Wimpy player has WordPress support
• Spotback rating plugin
• John Chow’s 10 best plugins
• Blog Joint top plugins

There seems to be no out-of the box solution for moving a site with several levels of subcategories from Blosxom to WordPress and keeping the subcategories intact. Neither Jason Clark’s, nor hohndel.org’s suggestions worked for me without a lot of work. I’ve had no luck with the WordPress wiki or the standard ways of importing from Blosxom to WordPress.

Importing straight from RSS to predefined categories worked best for me and that’s how I will migrate. This will detail and make available the steps for future reference.

The instructions assume that you have a little bit of Unix knowledge and login/filetransfer access to the server where your site is hosted. WordPress should be installed and working. The custom rss flavour and modified rss-importer mentioned will be downloadable soon.

• Download and install the rss20wp flavour to your Blosxom installation. This borrows the slug setup from Jason Clark, so your old Blosxom filenames (minus the txt-bit) will match the slug of WordPress. This makes it easier to redirect your old Cool URI-permalinks
• Make a copy of your blosxom.cgi script and call it blosxom.wp. Increase your num_entries to ie 9999 to make sure all content makes it to the new RSS feed and set rss20wp as the default flavour in blosxom.wp. Create a new directory and point $static_dir to it. Set $static_entries = 1;
• Run blosxom.wp with ie path/blosxom.wp -password="mypass" -all="1"
• Zip (zip -r) up the directory containing all your rss20wp files and transfer the resulting zip file to your PC (or Mac)
• Unzip the zip archive on your local computer
• Make a backup copy of rss.php in your blog server’s wp-admin/import directory and install my slightly modified version
• In WordPress you can now run Manage/Import/RSS and do a small scale import with a couple of posts to check that you are happy. Point the import to an rss20wp-file for an individual post or a small category and run the importer
• The posts are not categorized. In an ideal world all categories and subcategories could have been created and posts inserted where they belonged in the old Blosxom world, but I’ve found no tool that does this to satisfaction. So you will have to manually point the posts to their categories in WordPress (and write redirects in your .htaccess file). Your full export (including all subdirectories) of rss20wp files and the Bulk Category Manager plugin for WordPress should hopefully make the migration a little bit smoother (note: this plugin does not do subcategories). I have just imported all my “sports” posts into their subcategories by pointing to “sports/index.rss20wp” on my PC. If you do not need categories or have few posts you can simply import from the top-level index.rss20wp
• Redirection to old cool-URLs. I haven’t done this yet, but it will be based on the imported WordPress slug. All the old Blosxom posts have unique file-names and the import uses these as slugs. All my new WordPress permalinks are simply /%postname%/ (ie slug), so the redirects should be simple to set up (more on this later). For the old categories themselves it should hopefully just be a matter of redirecting ie “arts/music” to “category/arts/music”
• If you had a static image directory in your old blog, these can be redirected with ie redirect 301 /img http://www.halvorsen.org/wp-images in your .htaccess file
• Redirecting an old rss-feed to WordPress feed can be done the same way (or use an XML-redirect). The old feed at halvorsen.org is now redirected with RewriteRule ^index.rss$ http://www.halvorsen.org/?feed=rss2 [R=301,L]
• When changing WordPress themes the .htaccess file gets overwritten with a basic one. Make sure you take backups.
• I’ve also added some of my old CSS-customization, for Cutline and other themes that have a .custom class this is easily done by adding .custom in front of your old CSS-classes. So I have ie,

  
  .custom code, .custom kbd, .custom pre {
    font-family: "VT-100", "Courier New", monospace;
    color:#390;
    font-size: 0.75em;
  }
  

• Depending on your setup it might be useful to know how to convert from iso-8859-1 to utf-8

I might as well document what I’m doing with this site as I set it up, for future reference when upgrading themes or WordPress itself.

Theme.

The theme used is Cutline as it seems to be XHTML valid out of the box and is well documented. All of the old halvorsen.org is XHTML 1.1, Cutline is 1.0 Transitional. Note: post top level headers are tagged with H2 and lists are used for presentation in Cutline so I’ll stick with 1.0.

Modified files,

• custom.css
• header and footer.php
• 404.php

Header images.

These are cropped images taken from Homemade’s Flickr collection. The sequence for changing what images are shown using Cutline is documented, I am currently using random header images. The font used is Coolvetica.

Disabling the visual editor.

This is crucial when dealing with XHTML and is done in the preferences for each WordPress user.

I’ve been meaning to move away from Blosxom for ages and finally got some time on my hands to do so. It just seems like all the air has gone out of Blosxom-balloon. After struggling to get Ecto to work well with BXR (Blosxom XML-RPC Interface) I’ve decided it’s time.

Over the next couple of days I hope to bring back (most of) the old posts, get a nice template and start posting again.