Moving my blog from Graffiti CMS to WordPress

After years of using Graffiti CMS from Telligent and waiting for updates to this very cool blogging platform, I decided to move on to WordPress. Graffiti CMS was very SEO centric and I spend a fair amount of time configuring it to do what I wanted. I thought about staying on a .net platform since I am a .net developer, but the popularity of WordPress and availability of some very awesome plugins made the decision easy.

And there are some others who had the same idea: Migrating blog from GraffitiCMS to WordPress and Now Running on Behistun and ASP.NET MVC

Here are some of the problems I ran across since my site runs under IIS 6.0:

• 403 errors when logging in – my ISP needed to make a change to allow script execution
• permalinks needed to be setup so the links would be formatted like this: http://domain.com/category/postname – see below for details.

How to setup Pretty WordPress Permalinks on IIS

• create a file named wp-404-handler.php in the root of the WP folder with the following code:

<?php
$qs = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
$pos = strrpos($qs, '://');
$pos = strpos($qs, '/', $pos + 4);
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = substr($qs, $pos);
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
include('index.php');
?>

• Go to Options -> Permalinks in your WordPress admin page, and choose an appropriate structure for your links. I chose Custom with this pattern: /%cateory%/%postname%/