The Locus Online News blog, www.locusmag.com/News/, is now WordPressed. The success of this transition (from Blogger) will be the extent to which no one notices. I spent this past week, off and on, tweaking the layout of the newly created WP blog to reproduce the format and layout of the earlier blog, with only a couple refinements and additions along the way, and today copied the trial blog into the /News/ directory, deleting the old index.html page in favor of the WP-generated index.php page.
What I decided not to do was to actually migrate the old blog posts into WordPress. The posts already reside on our site, so migration wasn’t necessary for that reason. The only reason for doing so would be to allow category and tag entries to apply to all posts past and present, but the difficulty would be hacking WP to reproduce exactly the URLs for all of the old posts, which WP does not necessarily do in the same way Blogger did (though I found a setting in WP to do it very similarly). Safer, and easier, to let the old posts stand, so as not to break anyone’s links to those pages, and live without comprehensive tagging. Content from all those posts can still be found via the site’s search function.
Next will be setting up WP blogs for the other Locus Online blogs — Roundtable, Reviews, Perspectives. And then catch up on site content, which has been neglected in recent weeks (monitor listings, and so forth). And when all that’s done, maybe I’ll have time to read a book or two again.
