As regular readers of the RedMonk IT Report are aware, we’ve been a Movable Type shop almost since day 1. I say almost because our blog used to be published by a very basic ASP based content management system, back in those halcyon days when I hand rolled our RSS feed (you read that right – I used to escape out all the punctuation – by hand). Put differently, we’ve been on Movable Type for several years now and for the most part have been happy customers. The commercial support, in particular, has been useful more often than not, and has more than justified the investment.
But all the while, I’ve been surreptitiously coveting the Firefox-like volume of plugins and themes that WordPress boasts, and thinking, “Well, if I had that plugin I could do X,” or, “Wow that’s a cool theme.” It’s not that MT doesn’t have a plugin architecture – it does, and we use several (including one plugin ported from WordPress, Akismet). Nor that it doesn’t have nice available themes – this, which I recently discovered – has some very attractive styles to pick from.
It’s just that the evidence at hand tells me that WordPress has done a better job than MT of fostering a vibrant and sizable community. I’ll leave the discussion for why that might be until later, but it’s self-evident to me.
That alone hasn’t proven to be quite enough to push us off MT, however, given the difficulty of migration. Or more specifically, one aspect of migration – the preservation of our existing URL structure. I have no intention whatsoever of jeopardizing the often impressive search rankings that our blogs have achieved through no real optimization efforts on our part, so with the migration from one platform to another (easy) comes the need to repoint the several thousand posts we’ve generated to date (less easy).
Seeing what Alex is building with his revamp of alexking.org, however, made me think it’d all be worth it. But it was watching MT lumber through another sustained spam attack last night around midnight – with me ineffectually dropping random IP’s into a deny statement within our .htaccess file – that I finally broke down.
I’m tired of fighting MT; we’ll be cutting over to WordPress as soon as it can be arranged. Timeline is to be determined by how long it takes me to figure out an appropriate URI redirection strategy (how I wish I had a network offering to connect me to someone who’s done this before and wants to be paid for it). You can probably expect a lot of changes from the move, and I’ll try to keep you all posted well in advance.
