Migration

I’ve been following the development of both :mt: and :wp: for a while now. Since :mt: was first on the block, I’ve been using it for a long time. It is a well written piece of software, but as my blog increased in size, it wasn’t as good as it use to be. I’ve finally decided that I’m going to move to :wp: now. I’m planning to restructure my site anyway, so now is the time. Here are the few reasons that I’ve decided to move to :wp:.

1. Dynamic posting saves a lot of time. When I do site-wide changes in :mt:, I had to rebuild the whole site which takes a while when the site is large. Yes I can hack :mt: to dynamic building as well, but when :wp: does it by default it was a no brainer. I’ve been hacking my :mt: install quite a bit that it’s kinda messy and clumsy.
2. :wp: has a much superior theme/templating system. You can install a whole lot of themes, and then switch between them. It makes the site a lot easier to manage when you want to experiment with the design and stuff like that. I can switch the design within a second.
3. In the same way, :wp: has a much better plugin engine. You install the plugins by loading it into the plugins folder, and then it will show up in the :wp: admin site. You can activate it or deactivate it. Much more user-friendly than :mt:. With :mt:’s plugin, you have to upload files into a whole lot of folders, and there’s no activate/deactivate function. Once it’s loading on to your server, it’s activated (well you do have to use the tags in some cases).
4. For some reason, loading times with :wp: is a lot faster than :mt: on my site. My :mt: site loads a lot slower than the :wp: site even though :wp: is on dynamic build.
5. :wp: has post by email built-in where as with :mt: I had to install a plugin called MEOW. Yes MEOW works, but if I can do without one extra plugin, then yes please! I also managed to solve the issue with the line breaks. Well, it’s not really a solution. The thing is I’m only going to be posting by email through my :BlackBerry:, and the :BlackBerry: doesn’t seem to add line breaks to the email, so the problem disappeared.

I’ll probably have more to add later as I learn more about it… But so far it wasn’t that difficult to use.

Technorati Tags: blog, MovableType, WordPress