IMPORTING YOUR ENTRIES

Movable Type allows you to import entries into the system via the Import/Export button on the sidebar. The import functionality requires that the data to be imported is contained in a file and follows the Movable Type Import Format.

If you are converting from another publishing system, you will first have to export your data from that system using its standard templating system. The output should be in the form of the import format described above. See our help section on Migrating to Movable Type at http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/migrating_to_mt.html for particulars on how to export from many other publishing systems.

Importing Entries

Once you have exported all of your entries from your other content management system, you are ready to import the entries into Movable Type.

Connect to your FTP server; then open the directory where you installed Movable Type.
Create a new directory called import, then open that directory.
Upload the file containing all of your entries into the import directory.
Log into Movable Type, then select the weblog into which you wish to import the entries from the Your existing weblogs list.
Click Import Entries.
You have the option of either importing the entries as yourself--the author that you are currently logged in as--or creating new authors for each author name found in the original set of entries. For example, if your weblog is/was a team weblog, you would probably want to recreate the original set of authors, rather than import all of the entries as yourself. Otherwise you probably wish to simply import the entries as yourself.

If importing the entries as you, check the Import as me box.

If creating new authors, you will need to set a password which will be used when creating each of the new authors in the system. You should also leave the Import as me box unchecked.

NOTE: if the name of an author listed for one of the entries you are importing is already being used by an author in the Movable Type system, the entry will be assigned to the existing author, and a new author will not be created.
If you would like to choose a default category for all of the entries that you import, you can do so here. This might be useful if you already have a batch of entries in your Movable Type weblog, for example, and you wish to mark the newly-imported entries as uncategorized.

If you do not choose a default category, the entries will not be assigned to a particular category (unless the entries you are importing use the CATEGORY key to specify their category).

If you choose a default category, and one or more entries use the CATEGORY key in the list of exported entries, the CATEGORY key will override the default category, for those entries using the CATEGORY key; all other entries will be assigned to the default category.
By default, your imported entries will be assigned the post status that you have selected as the Status default in your weblog configuration. If you would like to override this, you can select the desired post status (Draft or Publish) from the Default post status for entries menu.
The Title Start HTML and Title End HTML values are used to identify a post title within the body of an entry. This is useful when importing entries from Blogger, for example, because Blogger posts do not have the concept of a separate title field. If you have named your posts consistently through the use of HTML tags, however, Movable Type can parse your weblog entries to find those titles. For example, if all of your entry titles look like this:
```
<font class="title">I am a title</font>
```
Then you could use a value for Title Start HTML of
```
<font class="title">
```
and a value for Title End HTML of
```
</font>
```
to automatically set the titles of your entries when importing. If found, the title, along with the surrounding HTML, will be removed from the body of your entry.

If you do not fill in these values, or if the relevant HTML cannot be found for a particular entry, the first five (5) words of the entry are used as the title, instead.
After filling in the necessary values in the form, press IMPORT to import your entries.
That's it!
NOTE: You should now remove all of the files that you imported from the import directory, so that if or when you run the import process again at some later date, the entries you just imported will not be re-imported.

You will need to rebuild all of your files in order to generate your archives for the new imported entries.

TIP: after importing your entries, if you imported them from a system without categories, you may wish to assign categories to each of your entries; a fast way to do this is to use Movable Type's Power-Editing Mode, which allows you to edit multiple entries at once.