Hi guys -
I'm looking to hire someone to help me with some backend stuff for my blog. First time I'm hiring the twelvestone braintrust, so I hope this is the right spot for freelance offers.
I'm the client in this case, and the work is for my blog. I'm currently on Movable Type, and have been in the process of migrating all my stuff over to WordPress. I'm 90% done, but there are a few things that remain which require someone to fiddle around more with the database side of things. At least, I think it's all DB stuff.
Here's the stuff I can't figure out on my own:
1) WordPress uses a different process to determine filenames for blog entries. I've been maintaining my blog for a really long time (8+ years) and would like to keep all the older permalinks intact.
Easiest way to do this (I think) is to compare database entries between MT and WP, using the blog post's date and title as the common link between the two.
Once the new site's live, I don't care about maintaining the older permalink structure... I just don't want to lose all my older permalinks is all.
2) Hard return issues. In all my MT entries, I wrote them without tags and used hard returns instead. When importing them over to WP... WP recognizes the first hard return, but not two in a row. Not sure the best way to fix this, but hoping there's a programmatic solution.
3) I had a hand-rolled blog for a long while, before I moved over to Movable Type. As a result, I have a lot of older entries that are marked with the same date/time stamp. Example: 5 entries that are all on January 1, 2003 at 00:00:00.
MT chokes on this, and there are a few older links that are caught in a Next/Previous loop. I'm not certain if WP handles this any better or not, but one additional task would be to pinpoint all the entries that have the exact same date/time stamp. Then, it'd be a matter of going and nudging those entries so that their date/time stamps are unique (00:00:01, 00:00:02, etc).
This task is super low priority, and may not even been an issue.
I should be able to export whatever is needed, or grant access to my hosts's CPanel and mySQL access.
Any takers? If you're interested, please PM me. I'm not sure what the going rate is for stuff like this, nor do I have a good sense of how long/involved these tasks might be.
try Odesk -www.odesk.com
Portnoy
I guess your set on wordpress and all, and it's probably for the best. I just thinking your fairly good at flash and haXe is real easy to switch to, so maybe it is worth taking a look at one of the haXe frameworks. I guess I see it from the point of view that some of the stuff your struggling with is probably because you can't just code some actionscript to fix things and php is not something you have time to entertain. Well there is no haXe wordpress yet but maybe you could create something similar with poko, ufront, haxeignitor or toolkat. I don't really use the back end haXe yet but from a flash perspective it certainly makes backend more viable and I would be far less scared to get my hands dirty. You can compile to php so you might find that you can untype and write a few externals and fix up the problems with haXe php along side the wordpress code... but wordpress seems fairly complex so maybe not. Anyway it was just a thought as I know your a smart flasher and the backend stuff is probably no where near as hard 
Thanks, JLM. Honestly, a lot of the links you provided seem to be over my head. I used to be on top of Flash stuff, but I'm way way rusty. So I think keeping with my original WordPress approach seems best.
Appreciate the suggests, though!
Assuming you are running Apache you could use mod-rewrite to rewrite the new URLS by adding an entry for each permalink that needs to be preserved in an .htaccess file.