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January 28, 2008

Clusterflock: Migration to WordPress

Hello Flockers. I wanted to drop in and give a little bit of an update of the things going on behind the scenes here. First, hopefully you have noticed a much improved posting and commenting experience and a lot less 500 errors. Andrew was able to make some changes in the back end to alleviate the cause, at the expense of a few archive pages not being generated.

To help move this forward, I’ve put out the idea of migrating Clusterflock over to WordPress from MovableType. I think WordPress will work better for how Clusterflock operates overall, especially the commenting experience. The posting experience will remain mostly the same, except a lot faster since WordPress doesn’t generate static files for posts and instead dynamically generates a page when requested.

The concern I had in making this happen was brining over the 7,000+ posts ( Deron’s way over 3,300 btw ) and 10,000+ comments to the WordPress platform. Luckily, they provide a way to do so. I took a backup of Clusterflock from Friday and was able to import every post and comment up till when I took the backup, which is great.

There is one more major technical hurdle that needs to be cleared before I’d feel comfortable switching us over, and that is making sure all the old permalinks work. I’ll be working on that the next couple of days.

Once complete, there will need to be a plan for the conversion. This will most likely involve creating a “no posting” window and maybe redirecting everyone to a “maintenance” type page while the data conversion and setup process completes because I’d hate to lose a post or a comment. More on that as things progress.

If any of you have questions or concerns ( how corporate ) please feel free to let myself, Andrew or Deron know.

Now back to your regularly scheduled flocking.

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