I started this blog with Movable Type since I had used it in the past. I noticed an increasing number of people were using Wordpress instead of MT. So I did some investigation on it and decided to setup a parallel site using Wordpress.
Wordpress is definitely easier to setup. The dashboard isn’t as nice as MT’s admin pages. And you need a separate copy of all the files (and another database) to run more than one blog. But the site is dynamic and written in PHP (instead of static and using perl). Not having to rebuild the site is incredibly nice. I hated that about MT. And I would much rather hack the PHP code than Perl. I hate Perl. There, I said it.
The template system is a little confusing at first. Once I got a new theme started, it’s not too bad. I don’t know CSS that well yet so I copied and modified the default CSS. I’m slowly trying to compress the CSS file down as I think it has more than I need. You can do so much with CSS but it’s yet another thing to learn and I don’t do that much web UI work so it’s hard to force myself to learn it.
My big complaints about Wordpress are the ugly (and user-unfriendly) dashboard and way the permalinks work. I wish that I could have a different permalink format for pages than posts. Maybe I’ll dive into the code and fix that. The documentation is not very deep so you need to go to the unofficial wiki Wordpress Codex to learn how to customize your site.
The process of migrating from MT to Wordpress wasn’t too hard. I got my entries in easily enough. The CSS took several days to get close to the old look and feel. I need to fix some of the spacing but I think the Wordpress theme now looks better than my old MT theme.
I still think Movable Type is a nice product. But I’m very pleased with Wordpress. I like using a true open source blog tool so I won’t have to worry about how Six Apart may alter the distribution of MT in the future. It’s fine for the MT guys to try to make a business out of MT and good luck to them. But I don’t want a commercial package. Those of you out there still using MT should set up a parallel version with Wordpress. I think you will find yourself migrating over as well.
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