Movable Type’s Shitty Export Format

Tom Sherman takes Six Apart to task for the fact that, if you use the “entry_basename” field for customizing entries’ permalink URLs, this field doesn’t get exported or imported — and thus your URLs will all break if you use the Import/Export feature to change web hosts; this, despite the fact that whole point of the entry_basename field is to keep your URLs from breaking when you change a post’s title.

You don’t want to get me started on just how shitty MT’s Import/Export feature are. (E.g. any entry that contains the strings “\n-----\n” (five dashes on a line by themselves) or “\n--------\n” (eight dashes) can’t be exported and re-imported, because those strings are the export format’s field and entry separators. I.e. MT doesn’t escape those strings when they occur with an entry.)

In a nut: You can’t trust Movable Type to import its own export format.

★ Thursday, 28 September 2006