Fistful of Euros Blog/Webzine

Hi, A Fistful of Euros has recently suffered serious comment spam related server problems with Movable Type that caused us to disable comments, one of the most valuable assets of the blog, and so we decided to change to WP.

That was easier said then done as afoe consists of 4 separate blogs that needed to be managed as WP categories with a certain degree of separation.

The first step was to hack the MT import scripts so that a) the WP IDs would remain the same for each of the 2800 posts and b) the MT-BLOG ID would be added as a category to each post.

Once that was done, it was necessary to create strictly hierarchical categories, so that only the blog categories would be at the top level of the hierarchy and each post would only belong to one of them, so WP_list_categories would behave nicely (of course, that’s not a logical necessity in the system, just a fact in our setup).

Then it was time to customize the display of additional blog related information in the sidebar – especially, to add a filter for monthly archives by top-level catgory, which I did by adding an additional parameter to the function call. Unfortunately, there is no way to have these links rewritten nicely, so the interal links are standard query strings, say ?m=200612&cat=23.

It was also necessary to limit the get_next_link and get_previous_link function on single post templates to the same top-level category.

In order to get nice permalinks that not only used the blog categories but also the “real” ones, I’m using a modified version of
Dmytro Shteflyuk’s sCategory plugin.

One of the main problems turned out to be php function conflicts – we’re also running a web based aggregator (a mixture of popurls and digg) as a part of the site that is a using a customization of the Spanish open source Digg-Clone Ménémé and magpieRSS to automatically parse RSS feeds and put the contents on the page. Alas, it was impossible to do that in a wordpress page, as some functions were conflicting. The same was the case with a polling script previously used.

Some things aren’t finished yet, but the previous multi-blog is now running on WP, and only a handful of permalinks, like MT generated comment feeds, have been lost on the way. There have been a couple of oddities in the now huge htaccess, but basically it’s working very nicely, and the spam spots are still entirely blind, for some reason.

On a blog that used to get between 1000-2000 spam comments per day on MT, we’re now only getting between 5 and 10, which, of course, are handled skillfully by Akismet.

So, have a look, if you like.

afoe | A Fistful of Euros