District 9 documents life after an alien ship appears on Earth, hovering above Johannesburg, South Africa in 1985. Not sure if this is a first contact scenario or an invasion, an investigation later discovers the inhabitants of the ship are in need of assistance.  The rescue mission is a success and temporary housing is set up in an area later dubbed called, “District 9.” Twenty years past and nothing has changed, the massive alien ship still sits above the city, South African citizens grow weary of their new neighbors nicknamed the Prawns, and want them gone. The Government alien task force, MNU who liase between humans and Prawn are charged with facilitating the move. The film chronicles what happens when a newly promoted MNU field officer, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), sets out to begin the eviction process, moving the aliens to a new refugee camp outside the city, “District 10.”

I smell a sequel.

You can read more about the movie and what makes it so good in this week’s Entertainment Weekly.

Intown theaters showing District 9

Check out CL’s Movie Showtimes for a complete list of theaters and times.

Making it happen, though, was quite a challenge. Out of the box, Wordpress allows you to export (and import) its database. If you wanted to move your WP blog, you could easily export the posts, comments, links, authors and custom fields, and drop them onto another WP install.

Since all of our blogs are WP, we thought, “It can happen.”

The plan was to combine all Bad Habits posts into one category (”Bad Habits”); export all the posts into a file (which Worpdress calls WXR); import it into Fresh Loaf, which would create the same category (”Bad Habits”) and drop all those posts there.

Yes — theoretically.

This isn’t the first time we’ve imported into Wordpress; we did it when we moved from Typepad. We ran into a problem with the PHP file that handles the import. We were only able to complete the import after digging the Trac for a file that would correctly import all categories AND authors (this one). The file that came with our WP Mu package didn’t associate the posts with the new authors. It just merged them all with the admin user. I’m not sure if the newer version of the file does the same thing; fortunately, we don’t have to import any more Typepad / Movable Type blogs.

Well, now, different platform, same story. The PHP file that handles the Wordpress import does something similar. The file we had out of our 1.1.1 install didn’t even budge. It just froze.

I realized this was because the export file generated out of the Bad Habits blog was too big – even though its size was 1.9 MB, clearly under the 2 MB limit.

I had to export the Bad Habits posts per author; only then would the importer handle the files. But then, a funny thing happened. The posts were not being associated with their respective authors. The new category was being created, but the posts were being assigned to the admin user.

Again, time to dig the Trac for a newer version of the Wordpress PHP importer. After messing around with more than six different versions of the files (none of which did what they’re supposed to do, not even the newest one), I found one file that was associating the authors (this one).

Except it was creating a new, blank category for every post AND every image imported.

What gives?

To go around that, I made the default category which was supposed to take in all the imported posts. So that when all those new blank categories were being created, I had to go back and delete them, causing the posts to be associated with the default category (something Wordpress does when you delete a category).

But what if you were supposed to preserve the old categories from the Bad Habits blog? I don’t even …

The important thing is that I was able to import the posts and have them show up under their respective authors.

Now, if only I could export/import those tags …

The Wordpress people have put together something called WP Mu, or Wordpress Multi User. In essence, it allows you to have multiple Wordpress installs under one hood, so you can be, say, an alt-weekly who publishes a half-dozen blogs or so, and run them from one back-end, and easily incorporate them into your website.

The decision was based on multiple factors, but the most important of them all, is the fact that now we can “house” our blogs within our site. They’ll look just like our regular content, except they’ll be the same blogs you’re used to.

By no means will it be a smooth process. Open source is open source is open source. And although we all get to enjoy the benefits of free software while spreading its reach, we also have to go about finding solutions to our own peculiar problems.

Fortunately for us, the awesome team (and user base) behind the Wordpress forums and community is savvy enough to dig each other out from technical traps we may encounter along the way.

We decided to add four of the most popular tools for aggregating content (trust us, there are plenty more).

These “tagging” services let you, our reader, save the stuff you read on our website to your personal file.

If you have an account with either of the four services we set up (del.icio.us, digg, reddit or Facebook), and you want to save one of the stories you read on atlanta.creativeloafing.com, it’s as simple as clicking on the appropriate icon, and then submitting your link.

If you want, and most people do, you “tag” the story with your own keywords.

If you’re new to these tools, and don’t know what they’re for/how to use them, here’s a quick run-down.

They are all services for essentially the same thing, “saving” any page on the Internet that you come across to your personal file. You can access these services from anywhere since they are web-based, functioning as a dynamic favorites list.

Instead of adding a URL to your bookmarks on your browser, now you can save one of our stories to your del.icio.us, reddit, digg or Facebook profile.

Each service has a variation of what you can do with your saved pages, but in essence, that’s what they’re for.