Upgrading from Serendipity to WordPress on Debian

As you may have noticed, I have upgraded from Serendipity, which was creaking a bit, and seems to no longer be supported by Debian to WordPress. It was a moderately complex task, as I wanted to preserve backwards compatibility and a lot of content with mathematics and code.

I installed the Debian package, and tried to follow the instructions on the Debian wiki but they are perhaps out of date. I got an error trying to setup the database, but found it was there and functional.

I  then used this excellent script to help import the old serendipity data. It wasn't without problems, the script needed to be placed (on the Debian installed package) under /var/lib/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ within a directory to be registered by WordPress as a plugin, but I got that working in the end.

This was an attempt to preserve ID fields as well. It seems to have worked - which has simplified redirects (see below). Comments have been "flattened" as the script warned, and there's clearly a character-set issue here and there, but these weren't serious issues for me. Your mileage may vary.

I found a good plugin for GeHSI style code formatting which I was using in Serendipity, albeit the syntax is very slightly different so I have some work to do editing a few entries (I don't want to attempt a global SQL regexp find and replace if I don't have to). I found this excellent seeming plugin for Latex and switched it into site-wide mode. So far, checking a few old articles, it JustWorks (TM).

Some of my old posts have images in the serendipity media folders that will need moved, but I was keen to have links to the old blog redirect automatically. I was able to use

RedirectMatch permanent ^/serendipity/archives/([0-9]+).* http://www.piglets.org/blog/?p=$1

in my Serendipity Apache configuration to jump to the new articles.

I can start to dismantle the rest of serendipity, except for the media, quite soon now. It's nice to have a platform that respects multiple device layouts, and hopefully comment spam will be easier to control too. A sample of most articles show they render OK, there are a few gotchas, and I'll try to work through them in time.

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