I started this blog on Movable Type version 2.0.something in January 2003 (coming up on 4 years!). Since then, I’ve watched from the sidelines as WordPress came into its own as the blog publishing platform. I never seriously considered switching, mostly because of the effort involved in learning a whole new way of doing things and it was easier to stick with what I knew.
But lately, I’ve been thinking about making the switch. First, Six Apart seems to have lost their passion for the application that put them on the map. Between LiveJournal, TypePad and Vox the platform that started it all is lagging behind. Second, I miss the little things like trackbacks/pingbacks that actually work. I turned them off recently. No point in keeping them on to collect spam and not actually get any valid hits.
Web Worker Daily is on WordPress.com, and I’ve been impressed at the editing interface as compared to Movable Type. Got me interested in learning more about it. I’m starting to get tired of this layout, but I don’t have the time or interest to redesign it right now. Seems to make more sense to take the parts of it that I really like and are most identified with me (the header) and work it into an already existing theme that gives me more sidebar flexibility with little effort on my part.
So on a whim, I took advantage of MediaTemple’s one-click install and about 3 seconds later, WordPress 2.0.4 is running at blog.momathome.com. I know I should upgrade it to the latest stable version (2.0.5) before doing anything. I also hear that WordPress 2.1 will be out soon. This will be my “playground” for learning WordPress, and maybe eventually it will take over here. We’ll see what happens.
It’s more than just changing the look & feel. I have 4 years (1571 posts and 2108 comments) to think about. I have to decide things like whether or not I want to keep the URLs the way they are now (/2006/12/name_of_post.php) or change them to the more typical WordPress way of doing things (/2006/12/name_of_post/) and all the fun .htaccess mod_rewrite joy that goes with that. I have to be sure that Media Temple’s MySQL issues are stable. With my current blog and its static publishing, if my database is funky I only lose the ability to edit/post. If I go to WordPress, a funky database takes down the whole blog, both the internal and external views. Just some stuff to consider.
Judi Sohn 
2 responses to “A View from WordPress? Thinking about it.”
I recommend waiting for WordPress 2.1. It will be out so soon (supposedly) that learning something now – and perhaps even learning to like certain plugins now – might be a waste of time.
I recommend keeping similar URLs with minimal mod_rewrite. I IMed you the code I use – it’s two or three lines. You need to have the “Underscore Permalinks” plugin installed before you import, so all the slugs are properly underlined. I had to manually tweak one or two entry slugs to match, but the rest worked just fine.
I’m preparing (as soon as MediaTemple puts the (dv)3 plan in place) to move my second site from MT to WP. See my blog for a few details. You’ll definitely want to work around the import bug re: img tag attribute loss.
Ok, I’m probably the last person that should be commenting on one blogging platform over another because I did Blogger for all of about a week and then switched over to WordPress. What I can attest to is that I have only been using WP for about a month now and being a complete dullard when it comes to CSS and PHP, posting and updating the site has been fairly smooth. I also appreciate the support you get from the forums.
So come join the fray. Here’s your Kool-Aid.