I’ve been trying to develop a template for importing Blogger posts with the new comment system into Moveable Type (not because I don’t like the new Blogger system, just because I figure people will want to do it eventually), but I’ve run into a problem.

Here’s my updated version of the template provided by MT:

<Blogger>
TITLE: <BlogItemTitle><BlogItemURL><a href="<$BlogItemURL$>"></BlogItemURL><$BlogItemTitle$></a></BlogItemTitle>
AUTHOR: <$BlogItemAuthor$>
DATE: <$BlogItemDateTime$>
-----
BODY:
<$BlogItemBody$>
-----
<BlogItemCommentsEnabled><BlogItemComments>COMMENT:
AUTHOR: <$BlogCommentAuthor$>
DATE: <$BlogCommentDateTime$>
<$BlogCommentBody$>
-----</BlogItemComments></BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
--------</Blogger>

The problem is that <$BlogCommentAuthor$> automatically formats the comment author name with the URL to the Blogger profile page, while MT needs just the name. You could do a little regex search and replace to transform it, but that defeats the idea of simple template output.