manalang

When Six Apart announced the new Movable Type licensing and pricing options a few weeks ago, many in the blogosphere went nuts. I personally don’t see anything wrong with paying for great software like Movable Type, but many bloggers apparently do. Many of those unhappy users have turned against Six Apart and moved on to other options — primarily WordPress. One thing we learned from Six Apart’s blunder is that it’s tough to turn loyal users into loyal paying customers.

Throughout these past few weeks, WordPress has enjoyed quite a bit of press time. And because I’m a curious user, I decided to see if WordPress is a better option for me than Movable Type. So, over the weekend, I decided to try switching this site over to WordPress. I’m happy to say that it was a breeze. It would have taken me only a few minutes to switch over if my weblog was simpler. However, when this site was running on Movable Type, I had three separate weblogs configured just to build this site (one for the masthead, daily links, and the standard weblog). It was a mess to manage in MT. I’m sure there might have been a cleaner way to construct this site in MT but I did it the way I knew how at the time.

Now that this site runs on WordPress, the masthead (the image viewer shown above), the daily links (renamed to Etcetera… etcetera…), and the main weblog are all part of the same WordPress weblog. The toughest part of the switch was having to stitch together the three MT weblogs into one. I also spent quite a bit of time on a mini-redesign and also implemented Matt’s “asides” customization. On the path to switching, I ended up writing two WordPress plugins which I’ll publish soon.

Throughout the process, I took a mental note of what I like about WordPress:

* No rebuilding… everything’s dynamic
* Fast posting and editing
* A better option if you don’t have much space available with your host — after I switched, I noticed that I saved almost 40 MB of space
* PHP is easier than Perl — took me about ten minutes to write my first plugin
* Active developer community

In defense of my motives for switching, I didn’t swtich over because it’s the cool thing to do. Frankly, I think the Freedom 0 idea is overrated — the good thing is that we all have a choice. I switched because WordPress, in my opinion, provides a better fit for my needs. I don’t feel differently about Movable Type, in fact, I’m going to continue using it on some of my other projects.

Aside from that, this site has been WordPress’d!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2004 at 7:03 PM PDT and is tagged with blogging, wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.