With the release of WordPress Version 2.1, the option to set your own front page can be accomplished via your Administration > Settings > Reading panel. However unlike the old explanation that follows, you must NOT name your home page template file “home.php”. If you do, this will cause a conflict with the WordPress 2.1 system.

I personally find that there are some weird behaviours when I use the recommended way of setting a page as my WordPress home page. I noticed that WordPress does not really recognise the home page as a page when I use the is_page() function.

I like to display my blog posts in the “/blog/” folder but I do not wish to install WordPress in the “/blog/” folder. There is a document on WordPress.org on how to make your blog appear in a non-root folder. I find it too much of a hassle to implement it that way.

That is why I still prefer to use the Filosofo Home-Page Control plugin to manage my home page and blog directory.

I don’t have to edit any reading settings.

This is where the magic begins. Simply select the page you wish to display as your home page and and enter a name for your blog directory. I also ignore my permalink settings and leave it as it is. That’s how I store my blog posts in a “virtual blog folder” and have all other posts and pages in the root folder. A working example is the web site you’re looking at!

The official instructions on how to import blogger blogs to WordPress is way too simplistic – Go to “Manage” -> “Import” -> “Blogger” and follow the instructions. Been there, done that and I can tell you isn’t that simple.

After you have imported your posts, you might need to spend a lot of time on various fixes such as:

1. Organizing the imported Blogger posts into the right categories.
2. Editing the WordPress posts to match the original Blogger post URLs. WordPress allows longer permalinks than Blogger posts. Most people use something like the “YYYY/MM/post-file.html” format on Blogger. Be sure to use a similar permalink structure as your Blogger blog at your WordPress blog.
3. Uploading your blog pictures to your WordPress blog. This is very time consuming if you have a lot of pictures at your Blogger blog. If you’re using a 3rd party image hosting service, then this would not be an issue for you.
4. “Broken” posts with weird formatting. Sometimes Blogger posts may contain a lot of redundant HTML code if you did not enter your post contents properly. They are invisible when you view it from the WordPress “Visual” post editor but you might see a lot of redundant <div> tags when you click on the “HTML” view. Delete all redundant tags and you will be able to format your posts nicely.

If you have a huge Blogger blog, good luck fixing all the things I just mentioned. If you need help with this, contact us and we will help you deal with all the hassle of importing Blogger to WordPress.