Movable Type Knowledge Base: Import Assigns New Entry IDs

Question

I had to re-install Movable Type, and when I imported all of my entries, they were assigned new IDs. Can I get my old IDs back?

Answer

Movable Type has to assign new entry IDs during the import to avoid overwriting any entries which already exist in the installation with the same IDs, so this behavior is intentional. There really isn't an easy way to fix this, because the entry ID is used extensively throughout the database to tie all the data together for a particular entry.

This is one reason why the default file naming convention was switched to use the entry title by default. We realized most users were implementing Archive File Templates to avoid having the entry ID as the file name, and thus causing broken links if they needed to import their entries.

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